I'm a member of a bar on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. There are badges and everything. My last remaining club membership.

If you’re wondering what the afterlife smells like then come to Fiji and watch the sun set over the ocean.

There is something in the mix of warmth, salt and sugarcane burnoff that, for me, feels like those last few moments of Gladiator where Russell Crowe is slipping between the arena and Elysium.

But then, over the last twenty five years, Fiji has made some moderately serious attempts to kill me and my family.

My little brother was almost dashed to pieces on a reef when the dive boat abandoned him (by request) so he could do a spot of open-ocean surfing.

I was once buzzed by either a large bull shark or a fat bronze whaler when I was left alone in murky water at the mouth of a river at the end of a shark dive to do my five metre decompression stop because my faulty equipment was leaking air.

If you are interested in experiencing what it feels like to have your spider sense dialled up to ‘air raid alarm’ then I’d recommend it. Otherwise I wouldn’t.

The same little brother almost impaled himself right through the head when a large wave knocked him flying from the front of the dinghy back into the boat. He landed flat on his back with his skull inches from the improperly stowed anchor pointing murderously at the sky. (I wince when I think about how close that was even now.)

We’ve all been hospitalised at least once due to some potent tropical diseases that always seems to afflict us honkies whenever we stray too far from a Starbucks. Fiji, in fact, is the location of some of my better-recalled childhood OBEs.

On one occasion in the large open coconut-palm-strewn lawn you can see in this photo I could see a guy get hit by a coconut and die… over and over again on a loop. I was reading Henry Sugar at the time and I’m pretty sure that happened in the book but I asked our child minder if it had ever happened “over there” and she said yes.

(When I get sick in the tropcis I wander in and out of books. Once in the Solomons I was reading Mary Stewart’s Crystal Cave trilogy at the same time as Congo and I would alternate between sitting, shivering, on the verandah of our jungle hut where I would watch warily for any silverbacked gorillas or sitting, sweating, inside the hut where a floating pink blob was singing to me about Caliburn. Combo this with some WWII wreck diving and some visits to cannibal victims’ gravesites and you have a very haunted holiday.)

On another occasion I was ill enough to visually hallucinated some cartoon demon coconuts (you heard me) dancing ring-a-rosie in our room while everyone else slept. They were more menacing than they sound. No one likes seeing a victory dance when they’re sick.

But the best one of the lot happened about twelve years ago… the last time we visited Fiji.

The second-worst Good Friday in history

It was the morning of our second day, Good Friday, and we were all preparing to head to breakfast when my mother the psychonaut emitted a weird shriek, bit through her tongue, and for the first time in her life, had a grand mal seizure.

Do you know what an ambulance is when you are in an isolated corner of a Fijian island? It’s a mini-van used to take people on shopping tours. I ran till my feet bled to get it.

As she was being bundled into the ‘ambulance’, I lent in and plucked a few hairs from her head. My father climbed in and they both sped off to the only building on the island capable of providing a CAT scan. (The machine had no film so my father and the doctor had to stare up at the underside of the screen to get a view of what was happening.)

For me, it was off to the gift shop for what was the weirdest attempt at collecting magical ingredients ever. Coconut anointing oil, a frangipani flower as a pentacle, a little carved owl to represent my mother, a nondescript, wooden Polynesian man to represent Asclepius and a bottle of Fiji water. On the plus side, the shop was run by Fiji Indians so at least they had incense.

Kit assembled, I banished my little brothers to the bar, told them not to disturb me and locked myself in the hotel room stained with my mother’s blood.

As you might expect, the rite was intense. One of the few instances where the words and current flow perfectly and you pull in stars like you’re plucking apples from a tree.

Once completed I dismantled the kit, picked up the frangipantacle, clambered over some banded sea snake-infested rocks to the top of a small cliff that faced out into the Pacific.

With one final petition for aid, the flower was flung into the ocean… and floated out to sea against the current. Things were probably going to be okay.

And they were.

My mother the psychonaut was released from hospital on Easter Sunday (but of course) and has absolutely no memory of Easter Saturday. It is now known as “that one time when mum pulled a Jesus”. She has never had another incident.

Even to the untrained eye it’s obvious that Fiji is in some sense Significant for us. For some reason beyond the normal statistical increase in the chance of doing yourself harm on vacation (because you’re outside your usual routine), this is a place of lessons.

As the plane took off at the end of our last vacation it was clear to me that our story with Fiji hadn’t ended yet. Not that I thought for a second the next chapter would be for it to host my little brother’s wedding.

But here we are. Thanks to a weird mix of my increased astral sensitivity and a truly shocking case of jet lag, I feel I have some of those overly-complex, poorly-translated, Blavatskian energy bodies and that they’re going haywire… swirling in the opposite direction like the water down this hemisphere’s drains. School is definitely in.

And the bride and groom are due to arrive within the hour. Probably time to burn off some more karma.

Smells a bit like sugarcane at sunset.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

We’re off to Fiji for my little brother’s wedding and a tropical version of a hobbit party. (So very many generations of relatives converging all in the one place.)

This will actually be my 23rd visit to Fiji. I’ve been shark diving all over the Pacific. Not a brag, it’s an explanation of what I hope to achieve:

These islands in particular have been the setting for some fairly dramatic magic moments in my life, including what was possibly my most significant enchantment ever.

The intention is to use the mid-afternoon hour where it pours with rain each day with the grim regularity of an English drought to cover these stories off.

But as William Shatner says, “if you want to get screwed, tell your plans to God.” Apparently the connection speeds are total pants.

Anyway, feel free to follow along via Posterous for pictures or Twitter for pithy comments about my freakshow family. This is my way of saying that there might be some delay in approving comments or returning emails. It’s probably not because I find you weird and unsettling.

Oh, and just for the fuck of it… there is a very good chance I will be live tweeting my little brother’s wedding. Ain’t I a stinker?

Some other news

In the meantime, please enjoy some off-season programming:

A London Typographia Map

This is really fun if you either know London or are a font nerd. Have a play.

Can we geoengineer our way out of climate change?

No. But we’ll certainly flip a few switches and see what happens. It’s chaos either way. (Hooray!) Nice piece from the New Yorker.

Is the 1% rule dead?

The BBC explains how it is seeing significant changes in online user behaviour. Definitely worth a read if you blog or trade online.

UK cities are “turning into Detroit”

Also could be called “why the Germans are significantly better at managing national infrastructure and workforces to almost-completely eliminate employment blackspots despite having been bombed into oblivion, carved violently in twain and unceremoniously thrust back together.” What’s our excuse? Thatcher one and Thatcher two.

To innovate, experiment

Do me a favour: fail at a lot of things while I’m swimming with sharks and drinking rum on a beach.

My birth town is now a hipster paradise

If you’re wondering what kind of jerks I’ll be inappropriately loud in a hotel bar with. Hipsters. Just LOOK at this fucking hipster town.

A biography of Marsilio Ficino

Whom you know I love.

Why we cry on airplanes

Not like I’m going to, or anything. Look away now.

Dr Sheldrake schools a naysayer in front of an audience

More on my whole telepathy/NDE kick. Read this whole piece for an example of how orthodox “science” refuses to engage with actual scientific evidence. Contains references to a psychic parrot. Amazing. Little tip: select all, copy, paste into a document where you can embiggen. Either that or zoom in. It’s extremely difficult to read but very much worth your while.

And that’s me. See you after the jump, Los Angeles.

Lemon out.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

We know that. It’s an on-paper civil organisation that was originally run by a large number of the 7,000 Nazis put to work in America at the end of the war.

And despite having an ostensibly non-military remit, the organisation picked up the pieces of US space strategy from the military.

Space was ‘owned’ by the military for over ten years before the creation of NASA.

The military’s own OSI was in charge of investigating the Maury Island incident, for example.

This incident occurred in 1947; the very same year as the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting, Roswell, the creation of the CIA and the creation of the Department of the Air Force. (Remember that coincidence is things co-inciding.)

One of the OSI’s UFO investigators was a man sometimes called Jack Martin… who also happened to be a bishop in a weird, fake church known as the American Orthodox Catholic Church or AOCC. (As was J Edgar Hoover.)

The AOCC has only bishops, no priests and no congregations. It appears in the FBI files relating to the JFK assassinations because basically everyone orbiting the main suspects was a member of a fake church whose bishops would investigate UFO incidents.

In the video below, researcher Peter Levenda talks about how the only building he has ever been able to find relating to this mysterious, fake church was in the Bronx. As I watched through it on the weekend, the penny dropped and landed in a weird corner of my brain.

This is the same mysterious group of fake priests described in Dead Names who accidentally attended Bobby Kennedy’s funeral and -oh, I don’t know- wrote the fucking Simonomicon.

That’s when it occurred to me this fascinating presenter wasn’t letting on all he knew. (But you should always know your audience so no judgement.)

One way or another, the Necronomicon story just got crazier. Because these bishops are also connected via a number of weird post-war figures with a really bizarre séance that happened in a farmhouse in Maine in 1952, involving a group of beings calling themselves The Nine.

(And if you want to see where these events tie in with the Whisky Rant then watch the other worthwhile video from the same series. Make it a weekend project.)

The Nine

The man at the centre of this séance was Andrija Puharich, US Army Captain and author of a government paper on the weaponisation of ESP. And this is the guy that is moving in the same murky circles as bishops Jack Martin and Fred Crisman.

The farmhouse in question was owned by his bizarro Round Table Foundation which appears to have received funding from the CIA.

Puharich gathered together nine people on a warm night in early June. And it’s a line-up that positively defines “could not make this up”. The group included:

• Arthur Young, who invented the Bell helicopter. However at the end of WWII he abandoned military aviation to concentrate full-time on the paranormal.
• Arthur’s wife, Ruth… previously of the Forbes dynasty. Her son, Michael, would get a job at Bell Aerospace through her and Arthur’s influence. (Michael’s wife got Lee Harvey Oswald his job at the book depository. She was learning Russian from Oswald’s wife who was living with her in Irving, Texas. Oh, and her father worked for a CIA front called the Agency for International Development. Lee Harvey Oswald left the coffee company in New Orleans, saying to his co-workers he was “going to work for NASA.” After the assassination, two other coffee company employees get jobs at NASA. Just saying.)
• Mary Bancroft; of the Bancroft dynasty who would much later sell the Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal to Murdoch. She also happened to be the mistress of the then-CIA chief. (The one JFK fired after the Bay Of Pigs after saying he was also going to break up the CIA… who conveniently went on to investigate JFK’s death. Just saying.)
• Marcella Du Pont of the Du Pont family.
• Alice Bouverie who was born into the Astor dynasty. (Her father died on the Titanic and her first husband was a Czarist prince who would work for the OSS during WWII.)

Here’s what happened at the séance:

These gods, who were nine in number as well, were part of one great, creator god known as Atum. The other gods consisted of Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Seth, Nephthys, and sometimes Horus.

Communication with these entities was handled by the medium, an Indian gentleman referred to as Dr. D.G. Vinod, who slipped into a trance state at 12:15 AM and began speaking as ‘the Nine’ by 12:30. Afterwards Dr. Vinod would claim to have no memory of the conversation that preceded between the Ennead Nine and their human counterparts. 

During the course of the seance the mystical Nine informed the human nine that they would be in charge of bringing about a mystical renaissance on Earth. From there the Nine ventured into quasi-scientific, philosophical constructs that eventually led to the acknowledgement that they, the Grand Ennead, were in fact extraterrestrial beings living in an immense spaceship hovering invisibly over the planet and that the assembled congregation had been selected to promote their agenda on Earth.

Not a bad collection of people to pull together if you wanted to promote a specific agenda over the second half of the twentieth century. Untold riches and connective power in one farmhouse. In fact, you have to wonder what percentage of American wealth was controlled by people related to the attendees.

Writing about the face on Mars and its relation to a descendant group sprung from this very séance, Chris Knowles points out:

And the other conundrum here is if the Council of Nine’s psychics saw this thing before it was photographed in 1976, did NASA go looking for it solely based on their advice? What does that say about the influence of a group that most people could be excused for dismissing as a bunch of gullible New Agers?

The Nine would go on to surface in weird places for decades including near Uri Geller (the AP is Puharich, who first brought Geller to the US), President Ford, Gene Roddenberry (Deep Space Nine anyone?), Al Gore as well as Soviets surrounding Gorbachev who were instrumental in the collapse of communism as mentioned in this old Fortean Times piece.  It’s not unreasonable to assume there were many more such places.

Simon

Back to the Simonomicon.

From people who have met him, Simon is adamant that he didn’t make the book up, that he did, in fact, find it in the home of AOCC-offshoot bishop William Prazky.

Of course, various people over the years have come forward claiming to have contributed design work for the motifs and such.

And of course, the convenient fire that destroyed the original document in Dead Names is patently untrue.

That’s fine.

No one seriously expects a 1500-year-old document to have survived in a legible state down to the seventies. For literally dozens of reasons, the Necronomicon is not an antiquitous survival.

But here’s where it gets pretty weird.

The origin of the document lies with a bunch of weird faux-catholic bishops who have been investigating UFO phenomena since the late forties, who were associated via Puharich with a séance in which American royalty contacted extraterrestrial beings, have direct ties to the founders of NASA (including as least one Nazi) and may have actually killed a president.

Channelled instructions from ancient beings from the stars, a ‘fake’ book about beings from the stars. What if Simon isn’t lying but instead of an early Arabic Grimoire, the manuscript is an extradimensional download?

Let’s try then for a selective, potted timeline of the Necronomicon:

• As per Dead Names, Some tenuous seals and references to Kutulu as some kind of Arabic underworld or possibly a being known as ‘The Abandoner’. Whatever, the pre-Lovecraft stuff is pretty flimsy because obviously it’s retrospective.
• Lovecraft includes The Necronomicon in his stories for the first time.
• Some of his other nerd friends include it in their stories.
• Lovecraft dies.
• A séance in Maine where rocket scientists and American royalty contact a group of aliens calling themselves The Nine. One of those present has sustained professional contact with shadowy alterna-bishops who themselves have a direct connection with the first Necronomicon manuscript. Other people at the séance will go on to house Lee Harvey Oswald’s family in their home. Still others will spend decades working with Nazis to build spaceships and put humans on the moon for official reasons that still don’t make sense to this day.
• Simonomicon published. It will become the most-published Grimoire ever in the English language. It purports to be ‘real’ (whatever that means).
• Lovecraft’s mythos is codified into a coherent, workable form by a games company in the eighties. They fill the holes in the mythos, Jurassic Park-style by blending it with some now-slightly-out-of-date Sumerian cosmology. (An important step too few people focus on.)
• Other Necronomicon systems, cleaving closer to the coherent mythos, are published: books, tarot sets, etc.
• A slew of Cthulu B-movies of varying quality but consistent awesomeness are released over the last twenty five years.
• That South Park episode.

So when it says in The Apophenion that the Necronomicon “fell in from elsewhere and disintegrated on impact” in my mind it really does start to look like a spaceship crashing to earth and flinging pieces over time and space. This is a quote from Simon’s Dead Names:

Kenneth Grant, the major interpreter of the works of magician Aleister Crowley, sees in occult practices the same evidence for interstellar contact through ritual. Grant also links this concept with the Necronomicon mythos, and sees in its magical system a method for communicating with extraterrestrial beings, beings we believe are angels, demons, or other spiritual forces. If we look at the system of the Golden Dawn -the British occult society that exerted so much influence on twentieth century magic- we see only faint echoes of this point of view, burdened as it is by references to ancient Egyptian gods and Qabalistic and Masonic terminology. 

The magical groups that have sprung up around the Necronomicon, however, are consciously aware of this aspect to their practice and realize that the entities whose presences are made known during the course of their rituals may be described as either spiritual or extraterrestrial forces… or both.

It is entirely possible that the Sumerian religious experience -and hence, all religious experience in the world that derives from it- is based on what could be the most important and profound psychic event in the history of humanity: contact with beings from another planet or star.

One final piece of the story that doesn’t fit anywhere. Puharich:

So to recap, we have a brilliant doctor and research scientist drafted into the US intelligence network for which he would continue an on again, off again relationship with till at least the 1970s. Much of his working during this time revolved around psychic ability and drugs and that would help unlock this ability. In the same time he was also channelling entities that claimed to be both the gods of ancient Egypt as well as space aliens, with the backing of wealthy and powerful patrons with deep ties to the military-industrial complex.

The enigmatic convener of the séance was obsessed with finding a chemical to stimulate psychic ability and published a widely-disseminated book on the use of psychoactive mushrooms which was used as a reference by Tim Leary and possibly the CIA… ultimately ‘switching on’ millions of people (including myself if I’m honest).

Clearly, on that June night in Maine in 1952, The Neighbours were in a talkative mood.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

Bordeaux. For some reason, the home of the last ever Virgin Megastore.

The sound of champagne corks popping in the narrow street interrupts our conversation.

We are in Bordeaux and according to the smartphone at the next table streaming BBC Worldwide, France has just elected a socialist president.

So these revellers are literally champagne socialists. This amuses me.

But it also makes me pause.

The last few weeks have seen an update in the factors swirling around the apocalypse.

Spain is about to bail out more banks, Britain is back in recession, unfortunately-named neo-Nazis are on the rise across Europe, Greece is about to declare bankruptcy and withdraw from the Euro.

And then we have the new resident of the Élysée Palace, Monsieur Normal.

He interests me. And not just because he closer to my political worldview than the histrionic little man in the platform shoes with the hot wife.

He interests me because he is going to ultimately save Europe by first quietly destroying it, an act which will probably roll the whole world back to 2008. And you know what? It probably should happen.

Greece will likely leave the Euro within days, shifting the focus to Spain and Italy, both of whom are -unlike Greece- actually real countries. Investment for growth requires the creation of Eurobonds which Germany opposes. Either they’ll acquiesce and provide the liquidity to Marshall Plan the rest of Europe or they’ll ‘pop out the top’ and return to the Deutsche Mark. This would massively devalue the Euro which would bring foreign investment whilst simultaneously improving exports.

Of course, a Eurozone shorn of its malfunctioning member states with a huge government stimulus could bring the whole world roaring back to growth on the back of huge new demand.

Droughts, Presidential elections, Jubilees, currency collapses, the humbling of media barons, installing missile launchers on the tops of council houses in London’s East End for ‘security reasons’. The whole thing reminds me of a randomly-assembled version of the domino scene from V For Vendetta:

How do you outrun the dominos?

• Get better at divination.
• Cut the anchor line.
• Fight dirty.

Rounding out the list… learn to scenario plan. We are in one of those moments that is so good for magic and so bad for predictability.

A Eurozone without Germany is a very different proposition to a Eurozone without Greece. And what if the whole edifice comes tumbling down just in time for US elections, giving the ‘free’ world a tax-avoiding, millionaire Mormon for a leader?

Don’t think this doesn’t affect you. What’s so weird about this apocalypse is that the macro is personal. It’s like that famous chaos mathematics phrase… a socialist flaps his wings in Paris and ten thousand people lose their jobs in Arizona. Or something.

If it helps, here’s a reasonable overview of corporate scenario planning for you to download and personalise.

The next few months are going to be stormy. Be sure you have multiple safe ports.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

And in Australia the nineties lasted until 2002.

Which is how I came to be wearing a beanie in the passout area of a dance party in Sydney in 2001.

A guy asks to borrow my lighter. As he hands it back he says “you look like Jack Osborne.”

Yes, he is extremely high but in his defence, at the time, I did kinda look like Jack Osborne.

“Wait a minute… are you Jack Osborne?!”

He wasn’t the first person to see a similarity. Nor was he the last. In fact, I was developing a complex about it to the extent that I had highlights through my hair to blonde myself up and away from Jack and my natural dark brown. (Damn hair-covering beanie!)

So let’s just say the question wasn’t welcomed. And for a brief second my Lokean self toyed with the idea of saying “yeah I am, actually.” The inevitable next steps entered my mind. He’d shout “hey everyone, it’s Jack Osborne!” My face would be shown on the big screen above the DJ that was jumbotronning the revellers. Then somebody would say “you know, I don’t really think that’s Jack Osborne. Why would he say he was Jack Osborne?”

And the only thing weirder and less likely to lead to sex than being the guy that looks like Jack Osborne is being the FREAK who is pretending to be him for some terrifying reason known only to himself. (I did once get sex out of someone mentioning it at another dance party 18 months later but that’s another story.)

Instead I say “no”, pretend like it’s a really weird question to be asked and no one has ever said that before, then head back inside. There would be time for inane ecstasy chatter as the sun was coming up and everyone was walking back to the station.

Tonight was for experimenting. I was coming up on my second pill and something weird was happening to my wizard sense. I could feel the milky white outlines of my various guides and invisible companions stretching out on either side of me. I could no longer hear or communicate with them at all… the lines were cut. Trying to see them was like trying to watch a movie with your elbow. But I could feel them like I had never been able to before.

I tune into my sister dancing next to me. Hers are there too. I’m not hearing a peep but I can feel them. And as the track (which I think was Xpander because it was definitely a trance event) peaked it occurred to me that we are each of us part of a discarnate X-Men team. The Egyptian soul system, guides, non-capitalised guardian angels, totems, ancestors. You are a chandelier in pieces, fallen from the Paris Opera House ceiling.

Like anyone else who did a pointless degree, rave culture was something I studied at a tertiary level. It’s not just a sixties thing, there is a very powerful connection between an era, its outlook and its chemical of choice. Ecstasy, E, the dominance of the sound ‘e’ (“Everybody’s freeeee”) unavoidably curving your face into a smile as you vocalise it, multiple selves, The Invisibles, the Keanu movie that ripped off The Invisibles, non-utopian alien worldviews. They knot. They’re a package.

The decade between then and now, as previously explored, was defined by speed, coke, meth then coke again in pretty much that order.

But it seems that the aforementioned elephant in the room has been switched again and the blind men are having to start over with different stories and different chemicals. There’s the ancient alien thing in movies, there’s awful fairy realm-ish TV shows, there’s a change in chemicals of choice and chemognostic initiatory experiences (YouTubing salvia trips), there’s a move to multiple concurrent narratives away from monolithic, reality-defining institutions.

The whole motif of this decade is changing. I’m not saying they’re connected, I’m saying that there is something in the air. Quite literally perhaps. In a previously referenced Sheldrake interview they mention that a theory of morphic resonance is a better means of exploring the way artists and scientists can come up with the same idea at the same time in entirely separate incidents.

Which brings me to Nicki Minaj’s Starships  and how -consciously or not- it appears to be about summoning the Annunaki and contacting them using DMT.

Check it:

Firstly, there’s the Pacific motif, which you know interests me. Then there is the summoning platform the islanders (puny humans) are invoking around.

Then an alien ship beams Nicki down into the waves, birthing her on earth as Aphrodite. That’s Aphrodite who is the unbegotten child of the ancient stars. (Uranus.) Aphrodite who is also Astarte which gives us our Annunaki link right there.

If this isn’t “the myths of your gods are really about spacemen” then I don’t know what is. Wait a minute, yes I do. It’s this:

Mankind is literally summoned up from the dirt at the behest of a visiting alien goddess. The casual, almost uncaring creative act could not be more Sumerian.

The triumphant alien overlord celebrates. In the same location as the Gallimimus stampede from Jurassic Park. Which was, of course, a story about combining the DNA of two different species -one very ancient- to create something new and unexpected for commercial gain.

The chorus -in case you live in the town from Footloose and haven’t heard it (not being mean, I love the song)- goes like so:

Starships were meant to fly, hands up and touch the sky

Can’t stop cos we’re so high, let’s do this one more time

Starships, you say? That’s a rather DMT vision to match the… uhh… DMT vision of the visuals. Moving on.

Is that a returning alien overload perched on the fucking monolith of Phobos that American hero Buzz Aldrin told CSPAN about? While we humans dance, pray and worship around it?

Why yes, I believe it is.

And here, as shining beings dressed all in white dance among us puny-yet-unbelievably-attractive humans who are “higher than motherfuckers”, we have the lovely Nicki pointing directly into space.

Let’s close out with a background of repeating pyramids of light that bear a weird resemblance to what DNA sequences happen to look like when held up to lightboxes.

Did Nicki Minaj do this deliberately?

Maybe. She believes drugs are spirits which I totally respect.

It’s possible… but it’s not necessary. It could merely be culture doing what culture does: inappropriately groping at pachyderms. Expect more of this.

2012 better not be the damn end of the world because the next few years are shaping up to be very interesting. An entheogenic renaissance except this time around with the benefit of the internet.

Blindfolds on. Gloves off. Get to it.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

Firstly, it’s cold and wet. The stones are cool. There’s probably a bit of mist. It’s almost dank,  conjuring images of toadstools, gathering grey clouds and pulling your cloak closer against the “chill”. (Whatever that is.)

We didn’t have anything like that. There are technically quite a number of stone structures in central Australia but they offered no immediate genetic entry-point and are weird in an Annunaki kind of way. Also I don’t own a plane.

Being an incorrigible pseudohistory nerd, a lot of my vacation time centres on places such as this. Indeed, in the very same road trip we went here, here, here, here and here. The Rollright Stones were the first site on the list that felt the way a person who has never seen stone circles before expects them to feel.

The weather certainly matched expectation. You can see the second-by-second change from freezing gloom to glary January sunshine in the photos. But these are your risks when you travel in the extreme off-season. (Photographically the visit was a complete wash. Wasn’t feeling it. Was too distracted ‘feeling it’.)

Prior to the Rollright Stones, the other sites we’d visited so far on the trip had much more of a cthonic signature. (In their defence, most of them were tombs.) This place feels different. Standing in the centre of the King’s Men -the name of the actual circle of stones at the site- felt like nicotine… It’s head-clearing and somehow faster.

Reading up on the site after the visit, it is interesting to me that the Rollrights have that ‘classic’ association with dancing… the stones are dancers petrified by a witch.

Tuning in, the sense of movement is indeed jerky and rapid… like Terence McKenna’s machine elves.

(It’s also interesting then that the area has twentieth century UFO stories attached to it.)

Other than Iona and Glastonbury there are few other places I have been that have felt so active and… for want of a  better word… usable. Based on feeling alone you could cobble together a broadly appropriate, non-trespassy rite that you’d feel comfortable enacting in the dead of night… which is, of course, when you’re not supposed to be there.

In many ways, the Rollrights seem to be the quintessential home of our stone circle myths.

• It’s got the ‘turned to stone by a witch’ connection.
• The witch in question is often considered to be Mother Shipton. Whatever it is, the witchy presence beside the King’s Men feels very Sybilish.
• Dowsers go nuts for the place.
• An also-ran elderly British wizard has written a book about the place.
• It’s got the admonitions about not moving the stones or being in the circle at midnight.
• There is a history of local vandalism. Firstly with paint and then a few years back the visitors’ centre was burned down in an arson attack. Thus the Rollrights can both curse and be cursed.

So in a universe close to this one where you happen to be friends with the current prime minister and/or the bassist from Blur -both of whom have houses down the road- think about crashing on their couch for the night.

Because in this universe you wouldn’t have to bend at least two rarely-enforced laws just to give the Rollright Stones the updated esoteric exploration they richly deserve. (Shields up, get really high, make some offerings, see what comes through.)

No, here you’ll just have to settle for paying the one pound donation and visiting on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. Which can also have its charms.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

I still don't think the iPhone is quite as good as a proper satnav.

It appears the UK is back in recession. That sucks. Time to double our hustle.

What doesn’t suck is this announcement comes on the same day as the rapid dismantling of one of the most destructive global powerbases ever assembled.

Murdoch’s lie factories manipulated war widows, stole elections, fomented racial and sexual hate, bullied some elected heads of state and allowed others to drop to their knees of their own accord.

Even shareholders heartless enough to own Newscorp shares won’t stand for this. His kids are out. And he may yet be unseated before he dies.

Both of these events occurred around the corner from each other. London is amazing like that. It’s a city that temporarily puts up awesome statues of Genghis Kahn.

I think about that as my bus rounds Marble Arch and puts me eye-level with one of history’s most violent men. Even when things are shit they can also be awesome.

Take this so-called “drought” that in the past week has resulted in constant rain, hail and now flood warnings in drought-affected areas. We have just officially had the wettest April on record and May looks to be the coldest in 100 years. Here’s a quote from one of the people inexplicably “handling this crisis”.

Trevor Bishop, head of water resources at the Environment Agency, said: “It’s going to take more than a week or two of rain to undo the effects of nearly two years of below-average rainfall.

“The recent rain is good for farmers and gardeners, and the cool temperatures ease the pressure on fish and wildlife in rivers.

“But with dry soils most of the rain will be soaked up – or, worse still, run off quickly if the surface is compacted, causing flash floods.”

The rain would not “reach down far enough to top up groundwater,” he added, “which is what we really need”.

Hey mister science man… Exactly how does the groundwater get topped up if not for heavy, consistent rainfall? Like the month of it we’ve just had. And the month of it we’re about to get. (Also if plants and fish get access to water it’s not a frikking drought, genius. It’s called ‘what water is supposed to do’.)

Apparently it’s going to take three months of very heavy rainfall to replenish supplies. Now, I’m not great at maths but we’ve just had one, it’s odds-on for another on the way… how bout seeing the aquifer half-full instead of half-empty for once?

How do you think droughts break? You just wake up one morning and the reservoirs have politely filled themselves and left an apology note? Droughts break with thunder and floods and months of torrential rain.

Stop saying this is nothing when it is something. Something good.

Yes, our democrat-ishly elected overlords are building the world’s biggest spy centre. Yes, you don’t need to be paranoid to know that we are consistently being lied to. Yes, borderline-failed states are unable to preserve their archaeological legacy.

But this is a world that can also turn up missing pages of the Book Of The Dead, where higher education is democratising and where you just might be better off than you previously thought.

Does this mean you ignore the bad in favour of the good? Hardly. But it’s amazing what you can find when you defocus your eyes like a magic eye puzzle.

And, despite what you may initially think, these discoveries can be transformative. If you’re worried about personal bias affecting your decision making, then just ask yourself the same question in French. The lack of so-called ‘depth’ of belief is a persistent criticism of chaos tech but even something as simple as context can alter the way you see the world.

Take this racy magazine study as an example:

[A recent study] asked male students to choose between two specially created sports magazines.

One had more articles, but the other featured more sports. When a participant was asked to rate a magazine, one of two magazines happened to be a special swimsuit issue, featuring beautiful women in bikinis.

When the swimsuit issue was the magazine with more articles, the guys said they valued having more articles to read and chose that one. When the bikini babes appeared in the publication with more sports, they said wider coverage was more important and chose that issue.

This, as it turns out, is a common pattern in studies of this kind, and crucially, participants are usually completely unaware that they are post-justifying their choices.

Thoughts, memories… the pictures and scenarios that play in your head. They will define your outcomes. They are actual things. Here is what Rupert Sheldrake had to say about the persistence of memory in a recent interview:

One of his arguments against physically-stored memory is that: “Memories can persist for decades, yet the nervous system is dynamic, continually changing, and so are the molecules within it.” So how could memory be stored in the brain so that it is not lost by molecular turnover? Sheldrake cites recent experiments in which cater-pillars were taught to avoid a stimulus. After undergoing two larval moults and metamorphosis within the pupæ, the resultant moths still remembered what they had learned as caterpillars.

Even if it is only temporary, your thoughts and personal beliefs can even determine whether you remain in poverty:

The poor’s resistance to measures that could improve their lot is often due to a universal truth of human nature known as “time inconsistency”, he explains. “It means something very simple. It means there are lots of decisions that you think today you’d like to implement and stick to, but which – once you get to the sticking-to part – you don’t want to stick to any more. I think most of your readers, and certainly including me, have the problem with candy. I’m very convinced that I should not have as many sweet things as I do, but then when it comes down to when I see one, I really feel like having one. There’s an inconsistency in time between your self in repose and your self in action, and that’s a permanent tension we live in all the time.” [...]

The book cites one aggravating factor in time inconsistency: the disproportionately high levels of cortisol – the hormone produced by stress – which is found among the poor and impairs impulse control. [...]

“If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don’t know whether you feel like doing impulse control. If you are like me and you see that you have a bunch of ambitions that you actually think you have a reasonable chance of realising in life, you may be very different in terms of your willingness to give up the almond croissant. But if I feel that everything I’ve hoped for never worked, then what am I restraining myself for? That’s a completely legitimate way to think. And I think that it may well be that a substantial part of the reason why the poor look as if they’re taking worse decisions is because they don’t care enough, and they don’t care enough because they really, probably rightly, see that their chances of getting somewhere very different are minimal. If you’re never going to climb up that hill towards attainment, then you might as well not try. There’s no point pushing the rock up the hill and having it roll down on you.”

Bristol. Sight of previous faulty thinking.

Lordy, does that ring true.

A couple of months after my redundancy I forgot how to get into town.

Not literally, of course. But it felt like the person who would go into town and see friends was someone entirely different and I was telepathically receiving his memories.

The idea of how to spend time with friends faded.

If I was supposed to meet them, the idea would stew in my mind all day in the house, making me so anxious that by the time mid-afternoon rolled around they may as well have asked me to fly a passenger jet.

I knew if I hung around them they’d all know how useless I was, how much of a failure. I could read it in their mind. So I’d bail. Usually via text message.

Besides discovering that I have rather a taste for solo daytime drinking, all I could do was job hunt, visit the supermarket, come home and cook. I got pretty good at cooking.

Money wasn’t even an issue. It turns out you don’t need a mortgage to take out redundancy insurance. Mine is the kind of brain that thinks of such things but struggles with personal online banking. So I was getting monthly cheques that worked out to be well above the average salary.

It felt like a gloom had settled over all my previous options. I couldn’t remember how to socialise, I couldn’t remember how to like art. Looking in the mirror I genuinely couldn’t tell if I looked nice or homeless. There were exactly two days when I couldn’t get out of bed at all and that terrified me.

So I ate and drank. A lot.

And it was the long-derided techniques of chaos magic that turned it around. My situation was grim and it was the smallest, easiest, shallowest practice that saved me.

“Fake it till you make it” can now be retired after an axiomatic career spanning three decades. It can instead be replaced with exactly the same thing, neurologically proven, tarted up and ready for apocalypse deployment: “Take advantage of your brain’s guaranteed neuroplasticity and build the reality of your choosing.”

“If you go back to the 1950s, the majority of middle-class citizens in Western countries did not regularly engage in physical exercise. It was because of scientific research that established the importance of physical exercise in promoting health and well-being that more people now engage in regular physical exercise. I think mental exercise will be regarded in a similar way 20 years from now.

“Rather than think of the brain as a static organ, or one that just degenerates with age, it’s better understood as an organ that is constantly reshaping itself, is being continuously influenced, wittingly or not, by the forces around us”[.]

Meditation, physical exercise, daily gratitude, actively seeking out the awesome in a shit world, even an arbitrarily-chosen religious cosmology… there is no difficulty here. You don’t need to somehow get these beliefs down deep. Start shallow. Take a single step. It will fix you.

Here’s a similar experience described in one of the better articles I have read in the last few months:

I walked away with my master’s degree in accounting. That’s right: I walked away from the career I was so emotionally invested in, the thing I loved to do, and into a career that’s honestly just a job for me. It’s just something I do for money, nothing more or less.

I miss teaching a lot. Every day, in fact. But the truth is I’m so much happier than I’ve ever been. Getting out of teaching and not being emotionally invested in my work has forced me to do things besides work more. I’ve learned how to cook, I’m making new friends, I’m reading more, I’m rediscovering my love of things I used to do before I was ever a teacher all over again. I do productive things on the side too, like study for my CPA license.

When it comes to finding a ready source of good bits to balance out the shit bits in your own personal magic eye puzzle, there are a few places that are consistently worth checking.

What has happened in the last fifteen years is that we have simultaneously gotten quite good at mapping the brain and developing popular science distribution channels. And fortunately it seems that the era of inquisitorial, unscientific “debunking” is coming to an end.

Remote viewing has been conclusively proven. Consciousness is either non-local or at the very least can display non-local effects. The weight of evidence supporting the reality of NDEs is now unassailable. (That article is a must-read.) There is something gratifying in watching even science -perhaps the most ungainly of methods for approaching the numinous- stumbling toward something beautiful and significant.

The UK is in a recession and some kind of bizarro drought. Yes things are shit. No one is saying you shouldn’t be concerned. But that’s still only half the story. The other half is that somewhere in the world there are people having verifiable NDEs.

To close by misquoting a song:

Do worry. Be happy.

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If you're raising a terrifying cyborg then apparently a butterfly clip stops them hitting the start button. Seems like a vaguely dangerous hack to me. But what do I know? I just flee from them in terror, I don't raise them.

In retail strategy there is the notion called minimum credible range.

For example, should you wish to say that you stock Italian food you would need to have pasta, passata, oregano, etc. You can’t just put a pair of women’s ski gloves on a side table and say you have a ‘womenswear section’.

When it comes to your own digital life a similar principle applies.

However, in the case of Italian food it effectively codified about a century ago around unification. (Pasta was out with Mussolini and the Futurists then came back in but that’s probably the biggest change.)

To maintain credibility your digital footprint requires an annual assessment.

And I know what you’re thinking:

But Gordon, I’m a teacher/viticulturalist/mother/professional assassin/secretary general of the UN. I don’t really need all this crap as much as you do with your ridiculous job in a fake industry.

Which may be true but are you too old to ‘not get’ something? You ready to throw in that towel to the ‘kids these days’?

Because take it from me and the behavioural studies I read in my ridiculous job… once you skip one digital communication iteration you are off the ride. For good.

In my hometown I have a high school friend with a PhD in mathematics. She never joined Facebook. And now doesn’t have a smartphone, barely uses email, has no idea what’s going on with her friends all over the world, misses wedding invites and so on. She’s 29. From an actuarial perspective she has a quite a few more decades of digital development to live through. That’s simply too early to get off the ride.

When I asked her whether she thought the future was going to be more or less digital she looked aghast. Then I twisted the knife a bit by asking if she felt comfortable being completely ignorant of a world her baby is about to start engaging in within a couple of years. (Not being mean… I do actually really think she should be aware of the risk that entails.)

In the coming years will your contact with essential services, with retail businesses, with personal finance companies, with your children’s schools, with medical services become more or less digital?

Just before graduating high school, this brother and sister duo raised a robot army and enslaved the human race. They divided the planet up into hemispheres, Solomon-style and ruled for decades.

Don’t ever get off the ride.

You don’t have to drop out of your whole life and follow the ride around the country like a weird carnie but you shouldn’t get off it.

Hence minimum credible digital footprint.

Every time this post occurred to me something big happened in the digital world, causing a reboot.

• Posterous bought by Twitter.
• Instagram bought by Facebook.
• SEC investigations at Groupon.
• The Huffington Post winning a Pulitzer.
• Deb getting a new blog.

Crazy!

So we’re just going to go through a random list of products and behaviours and see if we can’t trace the outline of a foot by the end of this post.

Mobile

Mobile is one of those technologies that became invisible really quickly.

It went from ‘expensive and sporadically useful’ to ‘ubiquitous and invisible’ in a bit over a decade.

This isn’t your father’s internet. Here’s what the awesome Jason Calacanis has to say about Apple’s inevitable m-commerce product:

When Apple releases this product — and they will — it will spur massive ecommerce and consumption on a global basis. 

If iPhones did just 10% of the revenue of movie tickets sold in the U.S. via this method, it would be $1.2B of the $10.17B spent in 2011 on tickets. 

That’s a billion in pure profit. 

Remember, Visa and American Express still get their take and they still handle all the billing. Apple is just charging a convenience tax that would be well worth it to internet brands and retailers. 

The biggest hurdle in buying movie tickets on your phone is trying to type the characters it takes to enter your name, expiration date, security code, credit card number and zip code.

If iPhones accounted for 1% of restaurant sales, that would be $6B of the $604B spent in 2011. 

Again, pure profit. What if they get 2%+ of restaurant sales — that seems possible to me? $15M in pure profit.

Profit.

And last year, for the first time, more mobile devices were sold globally than PCs. The web will be majority mobile in about eighteen months.

So I’m going to suggest you buy something on your smartphone in the next few days. No need to waste money, buy something you were planning on purchasing anyway. Not an app. I mean transact. Buy something that actually exists in meatspace.

I’m also going to suggest you have a public recommendation service. Outside Europe I will freely recommend a competitor product but inside I would strongly suggest you shop local as network effects are key to usability with products like these. (The European option, my employer, is much larger here and growing faster.)

Blogging and publishing

What’s exciting is that in the next three years we will witness the culmination of a 600 year journey toward a lossless, perfect idea-distribution technology. It might not immediately look like that to our elderly eyes but that’s because, at the moment, the losers are writing our history.

That being said, the economics have fundamentally changed. In 2008, my sister, who works in global finance, said “there will never be as many bankers as there was in 2007.” The industry permanently changed. That’s what’s happening here.

Read this excellent piece of advice for food bloggers and apply it on a macro level.

From a credible digital footprint perspective, you still need your authentic voice to be “found” online. The challenge is just how much voice you feel like putting up there. And unless you particularly feel like regularly writing -in the creative, artistic pursuit sense- then I’d suggest something like tumblr. And if you have a blog that you rarely update I’d suggest tumblr then too. It’s a fast, easy way to build an audience around an idea.

But if you know that you’re never going to get rich or famous from blogging and you’re still retarded enough to want to do it then go for your life and know that I love you very much.

Twitter

Twitter still benefits from its asymmetric contact relationships. Let me explain… much as I’d like to, I can’t dial down certain voices in G+. It’s binary. It’s either circle or not. I could put them in a circle called ‘check infrequently’ but I want them in a specific occult circle, just dialled down a bit. Twitter and its API partners give you supreme flexibility in people you follow yet ignore, people who follow you whom you ignore, people you want to hear more of… and so on. It has more levers for the high-level social media whore.

Also, it has a widely distributed API which means you can log-in to other services with this rather than Facebook or Google which may or may not insist on your real name.

Twitter is better for and at breaking news and I think it’s comparative ease of use on mobile handsets versus both Facebook and G+ means it will maintain that advantage. Also, if you attend as many conferences as I do then hashtags are essential.

I still say you need twitter, if only for API log-ins. Although I expect some fun new features soon which could turn it from a microblog into a medi-blog. Specifically its Posterous acquisition. I’ve been using it since 2008. I prefer it to tumblr because it indexes better and doesn’t suffer from the MySpace blight of so many fuck-awful themes. If you use twitter expect Posterous functionality to be rolled out soon.

Retail

90% of my grocery shopping is online. It’s saved me thousands. 80% of last Christmas’s gifts were purchased online.

I watch my friends waste their Saturday afternoons trawling up and down Oxford Street -the busiest shopping district in the world- with pity. They hate doing it as well but its like swimming… a lack of understanding leads to a lack of confidence leads to unhappy outcomes.

So if you’re still a bit at sea with online retail then set yourself a monthly percentage spend target. set a percentage target for online shopping. Then when Christmas comes round again you’ll be primed to capitalise on the shift from daily deals toward coupon-ecommerce.

G+

The class quickly overwhelmed the hapless Verizon rep and incinerated him with nothing but the power of their combined thoughts.

Communities are weird. They’re inherently unpredictable in the first few months.

G+, for instance, appears to be organising around niches like a typepad from the future (find me) rather than weak/strong temporal connections the way Facebook does.

It hasn’t released its API which is annoying and, despite the protestations of their European VP of social a few weeks ago…. decidedly anti-social.

At the moment it’s playing a very 2002 game where it’s happy to let you play on Facebook within G+ but absolutely won’t let you contemplate a reverse path.

But you know what?

Think of it like paying protection money to the mafia. You have to do it or you’ll be invisible. Even if it doesn’t really do anything.

Here are some tips. on doing G+ right. Unfortunately the free book is gone. Apologies but this post is a few days late. (Got distracted with ranting about the drought I’m currently sheltering from in a pub because the hail is too large to walk home in.)

I got a copy. It’s quite good. Much better than Guy’s last book. Worth it if you’ve been meaning to sit yourself down and just get really fucking good at G+ one of these days.

Chrome

Full confession. I think I actually hate chrome. Like… I’m using it right now but this means I have to restart my computer at least twice a day. Despite its promises, it’s not any more stable than its competitors and most of its extensions are useless. Silverbird is vastly inferior to twitterfox, for instance. And if you solve my twitter need you have a customer for life.

Paranoid Gordon thinks this is because Google only wants you to use G+ so it makes all competitors just that little bit too hard to use. See above WRT protection money. Firefox has got less and less love since Chrome launched and take it from someone who knows quite a few Googlers who arrived in the company via acquisition, that is very deliberate.

Also have you noticed that both Reader and Blogger are now in the ‘More’ dropdown rather than broken out along the top nav bar? And G+ is the first option in said nav bar? Do you think that’s because they want you to perform both your ‘catch up’ and ‘personal publishing’ behaviours inside G+? (Note also that ‘video’ has been replaced by ‘YouTube’. Suck it, Vimeo.)

Seemingly no one will agree with me on Chrome’s shitness. My partner insists the restarts are somehow my fault. Chrome isn’t some saviour of the internet it’s just a goddamn browser! In the words of Will Ferrell “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here“.

However, your future success in literally everything from finding a mate to having a successful career to staying relevant in your kids’ lives as they age comes down to findability.

And Google has already demonstrated that it’s going to bend the rules in its favour to force you to use their tech. They rebuilt Barad-Dûr in slow motion in front of us -we all saw it coming- but it’s built now and until someone tears it down we have to submit to its diktats.

So use Chrome. And G+. And claim your business on Google Places. And use Gmail. (Gmail is actually the best mail product. Before you freak out, I’m not saying delete your hotmail/yahoomail just phase it out. Takes about six weeks before you can check it every three months. Also conducting business via any email account except gmail makes you look unprofessional. This is about credibility not preference, remember?)

Doesn’t mean we won’t betray them the second that we can feasibly do so. But, for now… the future depends on findability and, at the moment, the word is dictionarily synonymous with Google.

Pinterest

Now the third most popular social network. (Twitter took half the time Facebook took to get to 100m. Pinterest was the fastest site to ever make it to ten million unique monthly visits. There is nothing inherent in the virality of the products here. It’s just network effects doing what they do. How long do you think the next one will take?)

Seems to me Pinterest has two business problems: a product built on copyright violation and how it will make money without selling ads beside said copyright violations.

It also has one huge risk: Eventually Facebook will steal its core functionality and -just like it did to Twitter- make it part of its currently undeveloped photo featureset (*cough* instagram *cough*) and that will be the end of its point of difference.

Pinterest doesn’t fit my current digital life because I’m just not that transactional. Yes, I shop online but I don’t covet online. Any fun things worth sharing already have their outlet. So until it adds something I give a shit about Imma pass.

But if you’re in the business of selling shit online then you need to be all up in Pinterest.

Check out this little factlet:

In Q2 2011 Pinterest.com represented 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites. It now represents 17.4% and is quickly gaining on Facebook. (That shift from 1.2% to 17.4% is based on measurements we made across 40 of our client sites — most of which are top 500 internet retailers.) We project Pinterest will be responsible for 40% of social media e-commerce transactions by end of Q2 2012, reducing Facebook’s share to slightly under 60% from 86% a year ago.

Pinterest is your new e-shop window. Move fast and you can capitalise on this. Blink and you’re lost in the crowd. (There are also opportunities here if you would like to be a ‘taste maker’ in a particular niche. Find an uncrowded one, start a tumblr with the same name and get pinning!)

Keep your eye in

Always be fiddling with at least one thing that’s possibly going to take off. It’s a good way to learn how the people who will eventually define your engagement with the world around you are thinking. It helps you think new. Which I’m irrationally certain staves off physical obsolescence.

And most of the interesting things are happening in app space these days. I like:

• Cinemagram: your instagram replacement, hipsters!
• Platter: brand new so still a bit shit but promising for food lovers out there. (I’m gordonwhite. Find me.)

Most magically interesting

Weavrs are servitors brought to e-life. It’s been years since I created a servitor but were I to do so today, I’d incorporate a Weavr. (I actually prefer the name Weavr to servitor anyway. Let’s start calling ‘em that instead.)

Read this then look at this then read this.

Then just for the fuck of it, somebody please create accounts for every Goetic demon.

A credible digital footprint

Orright. Let’s stitch:

• Gmail as your master email account. Use it for the following services:
• Twitter
• G+
• Chrome
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Also a smartphone with which you can access this Google account

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Sigil of Agilma, 32nd Name of Marduk

Australia certainly has this going for it: when its capital city is burning to the ground the smell is oddly pleasant. At least according to my brother who lived there at the time.

I didn’t smell it. But I know the smell he means. It’s the eucalyptus oil, you see.

Of course, it’s that same oil that makes them explode. Sounds like a car backfiring. I remember periodically hearing them as we drove back home through a fire after ending our Christmas holiday early. (Because of said fire.)

Workers at the wildlife sanctuary half way home said that in between the sound of the exploding trees they could hear the screams of the otherwise silent koala burning to death on the superheated ground.

The whole world mocks Canadians for their really obnoxious habit of not pretending it’s cold when it really is. But maybe Imma stop the mocking as I apparently have one of those habits, too.

• You ever received a little plastic timer from a government utility that you have to stick up in your shower so you know when two minutes are up?
• Do the kids in your local primary school know how to install a grey water tank? Do they know what grey water is?
• You ever seen London do this?

Because it seems to me you shouldn’t be able to call it a drought until the number of farmers committing suicide reaches one a week like it did in NSW at the height of the Big Dry.

Which means England can relax. Yes, there will be water restrictions. Yes food is going to get more expensive (although inflation is dropping). This is a country renowned across the world for two things:

• Having, without peer, the best news media on the planet but only consuming the most alarmist.
• Obsessing over the weather.

So I understand that this drought is about to become your new national hobby. And yes, it would be better if the reservoirs were full. Yes, it would be nice if we could turn the fountains on for the tourists. But let’s examine the situation a bit.

There are a lot of comparisons between this current UK drought and the last one in 1976. However, this is a very different game.

First, the upside:

• There is a lot less industry in the south-east (actually everywhere) than in 1976.
• Secondly, agricultural methods have improved tremendously.
• Scotland is full of water. Full. Worst case scenarios don’t need to rely on international imports.

Now the downside:

• There are a lot more people living in the south-east today. Like a lot.
• Britons have one of the largest ‘water footprints’ in the world. It looks alarmingly profligate to Australian eyes. A former flatmate was even savage enough to leave the tap running as she brushed her teeth. (She’s emigrated to Australia, funnily enough. The new husband will put a stop to that, let me tell you.)
• I’m not sure on the details but there is apparently some kind of sporting event being held in London this summer? That’s quite a few more showers to contend with.
• Thanks to the always-wrong strategy of privatisation, Britain’s water infrastructure -and more specifically south east England’s- is some of the shittest in Europe. Fully 25% of all water is lost in transit. How much water is used by ‘hosepipes’? Exactly.

Consider it national karma

Perhaps my glibness is because whenever I ‘tune into’ the drought it feels more like a lesson and less like an ordeal? Tuning into Australia’s drought was like walking past the gates of hell with them banging in the breeze. (Spoiler: it was to do with European impact on the land and indigenous cultures. And look how much less racist we are now! I would go so far as to say “slightly.”)

Let’s instead think of this drought then as an Elemental Initiation.

Quick. Name a high-profile Celtic rain god. (Not thunder, not water, rain.) We tend to form gods around desirous, unpredictable outcomes like military victory, agricultural yield or stable monarchies. I was not short of indigenous rain gods in Australia.

Their absence from these soggy north Atlantic islands speaks volumes.

Adding points for the Elemental Initiation theory is the fact that this challenge falls on domestic water use rather than industrial. Because the thing about industrial water usage is that

1. It’s fixed. It takes a specific amount of water to make sheet metal.
2. It’s optimised. Well-managed commercial operations minimise running cost.

This is a good thing. Take it from me, from personal experience. You can shower in two minutes. I have. With a bucket underneath for the garden. You can wash your dishes in the sink. Actually I already do this. You can water the garden at night from a watering can. This was seriously one of my chores. (I loved it.) You can handwash the vast majority of your clothes. They end up cleaner anyway. And you shouldn’t be shaving or brushing your teeth with the tap running anyway. Seriously.

Domestic water supply can be more effectively ‘squeezed’ than commercial water supply. And there’s nothing like pain to help us grow. Kinda why we’re here.

Go through a summer of water restrictions and watch water security investment and desalinisation -both essential in the twenty first century- top the political agenda. Come with me on this journey, England. The pain is the cure.

The target, the spell and the odds

All that being said it’s best to start pushing those probabilities from as far out as possible. As PJC tells us, taking advantage of the intervening chaos improves the likelihood of success. Simon beat me to some suggestions by a day. Check them out.

1. The target

Weather magic is some of the easiest to successfully perform owing to the inherent unpredictability in the system. And British weather is some of the most unpredictable in the world. Watch this four minute video that explains why and also gives us our target.

2. The spell

In the absence of a local god and in the spirit of complete inclusion, let’s go with a Being that literally everyone can play along at home with because it is entirely fictional.

Meet Agilma from the Necronomicon Spellbook: Bringer of Rain. Maketh the gentle rains to come, or causeth great Storms and Thunders, the like may destroy armies and cities and crops. His word is MASHSHAYEGURRA.

You’ll find an embiggened version of his sigil at the bottom of every Rune Soup post in your RSS reader. This is a modification of the traditional (ha!) summoning:

Feel free to deviate, we’re all deviants here. Sitting at your computer you can just embiggen the sigil, chant, request and dismiss.

My process has been:

• Summon as above.
• Raise power using the final chant until you can almost smell the lightning in the air coming off the sigil.
• Fire repeated sigils straight up into the sky where the two weather cells meet.

Repeat as necessary over the next few months.

3. The odds

Now let’s assess the probability range:

• The likelihood that this quarter will fall into the driest range is 20%-25%.
• The likelihood that this quarter will fall into the wettest range is 15%-20%.

Those are the official numbers from the Met Office of “barbecue summer” fame. I piss on these numbers. Five fucking percent difference? You think you can predict British weather three months out to within five fucking percent? This quarter was going to go either way without sorcerous interference.

But it’s still going to get it.

So point your wands to the sky and think of England.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!

Prometheus. SO pumped!

We all have movies that we defend as being good or underrated even though we know we probably shouldn’t.

One of these for me is Alien Resurrection.

Part of that is most likely set and setting. It was the final movie in one of those all-night movie marathons when I was in high school.

So the first time I saw it would have been around 5am, after all the smuggled-in schnapps had gone, after we’d smoked all the cigarettes we’d brought with us (during Titanic which was the middle film), in that eerie mental state where you’ve stayed up all night on nothing more than the excitement of being with your friends.

The other argument in its defence is that, even though he took his name off it, I can still see the wonderful Joss in parts of the script… particularly the dialogue.

And… I dunno… you can see that there was probably a good film in there waiting to get out. The fact that cloning Ripley brought back an alien queen hints at an extraterrestrial beginning of our shared DNA. Presumably an unmolested script would have explored that more in the climax with the hybrid. (As it stands, I still think the ending works but that’s entirely down to Weaver’s acting chops… she worked a sophisticated ending to Ripley’s character journey into an absolute dog of a scene. The mythos is let down but at least the heroine isn’t.)

But that’s fine. The story’s been given back to the master (fuck you James Cameron) and he can pick up the DNA/AAT theme in something I’m looking forward to with the shrill excitement of an eleven year old girl/paedophile going to a Bieber concert.

In preparation I’ve been buying cheap space DVDs on Amazon of similar creepy-yet-visionary scope. Last night was Event Horizon (£2!) and while watching it I started making a list on my phone. What good space movies have come out since Alien Resurrrection? There’s been a bunch of great sci-fi… but specifically space movies?

And even more specifically, movies that use space to inspire Big Thoughts… movies that can only be told in space because it’s the only canvas large enough to take the paint. Why was there no 2001 in 2001?

Here’s my list of sci-fi films that came out between Alien Resurrection and now:

• Solaris. Film school be damned. Soderbergh’s version is better. I watch this film at least once a year. Death, memory, regret. Wonderful.
• Sunshine. Everyone has a problem with the final act but it’s still a good film. And upon re-watching I don’t see what all the fuss is about.
• Event Horizon. Answering the childish but also childlike question of where, say, the Enterprise goes when it’s at warp. (This actually came out two months before Alien Resurrection but slides through based on the sequence in which I saw them in Australia. Presumably that will hold up in court?)
• The Fountain. Is this even a space movie? If it is, it’s a good one.
• Wall-E. Is this really the best space movie of the last fifteen years? Try and think of a better one.
• Moon. A lot of people haven’t seen this. Do so. Actually this might be the best one.

Then we get to two excellent space movies that owe their existence to television. (It feels like there was better space television than movies but is that just because Battlestar really is that good?)

• Star Trek. Possibly one of the best reboots of anything, ever. (Why can’t it be JJ Abrams messing with my childhood rather than this arrogant, ruinous shitbag?) Self-referential, swashbuckling, it restores the original “wagon train to the stars” ethos that Roddenberry pitched his show as but never quite delivered. The paring down to its core is essential as Star Trek had well and truly collapsed under the weight of its own backstory.
• Serenity. The death rattle of what should have been television’s answer to Star Wars. Joss’s love letter to space as freedom, opportunity and the call to individual destiny. But still with a super-powered teenage girl because it’s Joss and that’s what he does.

What’s not on the list:

• The Fifth Element. It came out six months before Alien Resurrection. Also as I grow older I’m no longer sure how I feel about this film. Is it too derivative? Some days I love it.
• District 9. Not in space. Also potentially too ham-fisted with its meaning. Space is a place for Big Ideas, not obvious ones shouted really loudly. Space is for space babies.
• Contact. Not in space. Also came out a couple of months before Alien Resurrection. (But you see what I mean? 1997 was quite the year for space movies.)
• Avatar. I know a lot of magic people seem to like it but… here’s the thing… Avatar’s not on the list because I’m pretty sure it’s the most racist film I’ve ever seen and I studied Riefenstahl at university. It’s racism cooked down to its purest essence… the very idea of it. It’s a White Saviour story where indigenous culture is so insignificant that you can just smoosh together the bits you think should go in there. It’s like the girl who has never seen Star Wars describing all the tribes of the Amazon. It is the White Saviour of all indigenous culture. (He. Wears. Their. Skin!) Coupled with the fact that James Cameron -as for all his movies- writes dialogue with the competence a non-native English speaker makes Avatar’s shitness incandescent like lit magnesium. Battlefield Earth is a better space film.

For a couple of years at university I was adamant that you couldn’t have a run of good fantasy films and good space films at the same time. The fantasy films of the late seventies and early eighties were massively shit, as were those of the mid-nineties. (First Knight anyone?) The last decade has given us Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter.

But when it comes to space films it just feels like there is something wider going on. Can you correlate between decent space movies and a culture’s proclivity for vision and imagination? Possibly. Here’s a lengthy quote from Seth’s latest ebook:

When life is short and brutish, and when class trumps everything, fairy tale dreams are about all we can believe we are entitled to.

The industrial revolution created a different sort of outcome, a loosening of class-based restrictions and the creation of new careers and pathways. Suddenly, folks like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford became the pickers. Now there were far more people who could pick you (and offer you a job), and thus the stakes were even higher because the odds were better. Not only were there more ways to be picked, but suddenly and amazingly, there was a chance that just about anyone could become powerful enough to move up the ladder.

Prometheus!

Our fairy tales started to change.

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device.

They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.

A generation dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move.

We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream.

Which is pretty much the exact opposite way of seeing the world we had in the nineties as explained in this song about Portland. And the vision of the noughties, looking back on it now, seems like the mutant offspring of a borderline-consensual sex act between these two monsters.

Does it feel to you that we are about eighteen months past the peak of that way of thinking? To me, Occupy, space films, a rejection of New Atheism, the move from uppers toward entheogens as recreational substances are all blind men fondling the new elephant in the room.

We demand to see our leaders’ tax returns now. We all know that creating a better future than our present relies on nothing quite so much as having better ideas. The world has permanently changed.

If Ken Livingstone loses the London mayoral election on May 3, it will be because he inexplicably underestimated the likely impact upon public opinion of the disclosure of his own impenetrable finances. The figure that will lodge in voters’ minds is that the former Mayor paid an effective income tax of 14.5 per cent – less, as his opponents never tire of reminding us, than a City Hall cleaner.

Win or lose, Livingstone has ensured that – in future campaigns, mayoral and national – the publication of tax returns by candidates will become the norm. Why? Because, in straitened times, we demand, more than ever, to know that those who aspire to govern us play fair, and play by the rules that they set for the rest of us. The fact that we are ambling heedlessly towards such a profound reform of electoral practice – open your books, or forget it – is a measure of forces operating at a much deeper level of the collective political unconscious: a deep, inarticulate awareness that austerity is here to stay, and that political behaviour must change accordingly. [...]

Which is why this fawning article annoyed me. Jason Silva is telegenic. Fine. But his cosmology is genuinely anachronistic and in my view profoundly deranged. As well as being spectacularly on the wrong side of history. Read how he just brushes aside the concerns for the majority of mankind because he hopes his rich friends might make him immortal.

I’m annoyed at the implication that the natural home of having better ideas belongs with people who think we are about to turn into immortal robots. Or at least the ruling elite are about to turn into immortal robots. Because, alarmingly, some of the richest people in the world really do believe so. (Suddenly making the connection between Eric Schmidt’s obsession with having Google create robot cars and his singularity-based religious beliefs. Wow, creepy.)

Singularity-based immortality as exemplified in these videos may actually be the worst ever cosmology. It is the only afterlife the Archons will permit their servants to have. It is an atheist version of the Astral, the subconscious mind of the Demiurge-as-egregore. And if you fall into the trap of connecting up all your conspiracies or if you are so paranoid that people begin to believe you are a possible disinfo agent then artificial immortality looks like The End Game. (As opposed to one accidental End Game.)

You can see how it wound up being so popular at the pointy end of the plane. If you were a billionaire the desire to remain so for eternity would be almost impossible to resist. (Something something camel something something eye of a needle.)

The idol-worshipping savage in me suspects that the Powers have not built this presumably very expensive universe for us to simply upload our artificial Rainbow Bodies to Amazon’s cloud service. The Singularity is little more than the billionaire’s version of the spaceship behind the comet.

Seems to me spiritual development is firstly binary and then progressive:

• There is the explosive initiatory realisation that your meat suit is actually just a rental.
• Then there is how you integrate that realisation into the remainder of the rental period.

Initiatory systems grid the second component into maps of varying degrees of usefulness. (Good ones also trigger the first component.)

We choose the material world because it is a better way to learn consequences than the immaterial. (Try and burn your hand in a dream.) Downloading yourself into a Google car seems like cheating.

But imagining yourself in a cryotank on the way to an alien planet you found by analysing cave art from all over the world? Totally worth your time.

The future of planet earth may even depend on it.

Download the embiggened Sigil of Adilma and go nuts!