Magic and Occult Sciences

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Oct 072023
 

One of these words is not like the others. One of these words doesn’t belong.

MA in Magic and Occult Sciences

Well, kids, here’s a degree that will surely come in handy in the economy of tomorrow…

This is a flexible degree, which provides you the freedom to design you own course of study. Led by a team of faculty members across departments (see our “members” tab), an essential aspect of this programme is its interdisciplinarity.  Thus, the University of Exeter’s MA in Magic and Occult Science allows you to explore your specific interest within the long and diverse history of esotericism, witchcraft, ritual magic, occult sciences, divination, and related topics.

They keep using the word “science.” I do not think it means what they think it means.

But here’s where it gets spectacular:

By housing this program in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, we place the Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage back where it belongs in the centre of these studies and in the history of the “West.” Decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism, and anti-racism are at the core of this programme. 

Oh yeah. I have *got* to see how this plays out. Is there any more entertaining matchup than “Islam” and “witchcraft?” Throw in “feminism,” and this looks to be *hilarious.*

 

 Posted by at 8:39 pm

Yet another war

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Oct 072023
 

“Palestinians” decided it would be not only a good idea to launch thousands of rockets into Israel, but to send a large number of invaders into Israel to slaughter civilians. I’m not sure what they thought they’d gain from this; it sure as hell won’t be the overthrow of Israel. Perhaps it will be the conversion of Gaza into a depopulated buffer zone.

 

Israel In ‘State Of War’ After Hamas Fires 5,000 Rockets In “First Strike”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 1:44 am

Yay, chaos

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Oct 032023
 

Why everyone’s phone will alarm at 2:20 pm ET on Wednesday

“Everyone” in the US, at any rate, will supposedly receive a text message stating “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” Additionally, some sort of weird alert noise.

OK, fine. Here’s the weird bit:

The test will be broadcast by cell towers for approximately 30 minutes beginning at 2:20 pm ET, FEMA said. During this time, all compatible wireless phones that are switched on, within range of an active cell tower, and whose wireless providers participates in WEA tests should receive the text message.

The test will run for half an hour? I *assume* it means the system will try for half an hour to reach out to all phones for half an hour to send that one message. As opposed to blatting the siren out of your phone for half an hour. That’d be nuts. That’d be stupid. That’d be annoying and frustrating and disruptive. That’d also be the sort of thing that some dimwitted bureaucrats would sign off on.

 Posted by at 5:00 pm

A good shoot

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Sep 302023
 

Is it proper to shoot a stranger who follows you around at close distance, behaves menacingly and has his buddies film you? This jury said “yes.” My main question: “Why did this even go to trial?”

Jury acquits man of main charge in Virginia mall shooting of YouTube prankster

This is a good precedent. Pranksters suck. They *pretend* to be an immanent threat, then when faced with physical force, claim “It’s just a prank, bro!” Naw. Acting like a threat makes you a valid target for responding to you as if you are a threat. Maybe instead of trying to terrify people for clicks, you do something productive.

Sadly, the victim was convicted of some firearms charge, which doesn’t make sense given that the jury recognized that this was a self defense situation. Never forget: even in the most obvious self defense situation, where everything is as clear as can be… we’re operating in a  system of anarcho-tyranny where the government *wants* you to live in fear of actual criminals. Defend yourself, your stuff, your friends or family, the government will do what it can to drop an anvil on you. Because you defending yourself offends the powers that be somehow.

Here’s one of the videos of the incident filmed by one of the villains co-conspirators:

 Posted by at 11:52 pm

Oh, sure, let’s give the agents of the state a monopoly on force

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Sep 242023
 

Pennsylvania State Police trooper charged with strangulation, official oppression

According to a criminal complaint, Davis obtained an involuntary commitment under the Mental Health Procedure Act for a woman with whom he had a relationship.

There. Right there. That’s enough to go “Hold up, wait a minute, something ain’t right.” But even better, he found her out in the wild, tackled her and rolled her around on the rocks. Weird enough, but he’s substantially larger than her. In the video she *seems* reasonable enough under the circumstances. Of course the video starts with the action already in progress; perhaps she was going bugnuts prior to this. But what seems to be an ex boyfriend cop hunting down a woman out with another man, is a story that doesn’t sit right from the get-go

Some of the comentariat are complaining that the cameraman – possibly the new boyfriend – isn’t physically intervening. I get the impulse to do so… but I also understand that documenting the event is in all likelihood the best approach. Are you going to fight off the cop? Maybe, but then *other* cops will come hunt you down. Assuming the first guy doesn’t plug you or arrest you. Stand back, film, and see justice done in the end. Not as manly, not as satisfying… but a lot smarter.

Note that states that have laws against “high capacity” magazines and “assault” rifles typically have set-asides for off duty cops.

 Posted by at 8:34 pm

Civilization is doomed

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Sep 162023
 

Again.

The Dating Pool Dropouts

Yet another article about how young men are simply giving up on ever meeting anybody. The article isn’t *wrong,* it simply provides no solutions. Which… is kinda understandable. Nobody really knows how to solve this other than to destroy, outlaw, ban, erase social media and online dating and the ability for people to search *far* afield for their matches.

“That was his first date in three years. He says he once went six months without getting a single match on a dating app, even though he pays $30 in monthly fees between OkCupid, Bumble, and Hinge. If you count high school, when he went to the movies with a classmate, Jammall says he’s been on a total of three dates his entire life.

“And now, driving home from his date, it hit him like a ton of bricks: Why do I even do this at all? “

This sort of description is bad news for society, and it’s only getting worse.

Once more I’m left to wonder if this is an unintended consequence of various social and technological phenomena… or if it was intended from the get-go. Who benefits from the men of Western nations giving up on marriage, families, satisfaction, happiness? Certainly not Western nations. Perhaps certain sectors of those nations, looking to remake them into something else; perhaps enemy nations playing a long game, hoping to cause population collapse and demoralization in the West. And just maybe, as always, alien invaders looking to depopulate the more effective nations prior to invasion and conquest. Shrug.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:35 pm

Mining our way to freedom

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Sep 092023
 

Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world.  There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.

So it seems we have a few options:

1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!

2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.

3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.

Which will it be?

Challenges and Bottlenecks for the  Green Transition

 

 Posted by at 10:03 pm

Drone Crime

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Sep 072023
 

Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.

But then there’s this:

It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.

The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.

The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.

Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.

And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…

 Posted by at 8:14 pm
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