Damn I don't know how you do it and to top it off with the writing. All of that is very interesting and I'm tempted to subscribe but at the same time, worried about time organization and being overwhelmed.. and I also have in the back of my mind the opportunity cost of consuming too much information now, if that makes sense.
So on the topic of information overload which segways into your last point of training AI with GPUs--which I take to be sarcasm--there's an interesting alternative, or perhaps complimentary, movement of open source distributed or crowdsourced AI training, model fine tuning and dataset construction. Some articles about this:
As you probably know, there's a lot you can do at home now except it's just slow for one person operation. So there's talk about incorporating cryptocurrency to incentivize a distributed or crowdsourced AI system. This then pertains to the discussion about AI regulation and the increasing fear mongering around it, which I don't buy. There are ulterior motives and negative consequences of such regulation, which would conveniently hamper privacy and any kill wider commercial marketplace offerings, DIY, home lab, independent/crowd sourced efforts:
Speaking of which, have you heard of Unstable Diffusion, the *-chan equivalent crowd sourced version built to train it on things that the official Stable Diffusion has not or has been excluded to train on?
To be honest I'm not that enamored with the generative AI systems in and of themselves nor do I subscribe to the doom-and-gloom SkyNet scenario, which only works to provide fuel to the government regulation fire, but I see them as useful tools in certain applications--which machine learning always was, until ML was re-marketed as AI. Any talk of The Singularity is a dead end without first investigating consciousness IMO
You are also the first substacker I've come across who's familiar with old school internet (BBS, IRC) , 4chan et. al. message boards and what Isekai is, AND heath and exercise, and has broad interest in.. well, everything. I will have to get the Barsoom novels now. The oldest SF books I've read related to Mars is Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, who's still one of my favorite authors.
Finally, regarding your citation of El Gato Malo's posts here concerning Trojan Horse bills, I have been admittedly spamming different people and places in probably the most inefficient way possible, like I'm doing now, trying to raise the alarm about legislation that also relates to your post, "The Onymity Question". I'm unsuccessful so far, but I'll give it a shot if you don't mind. This legislation, both at the Federal level (proposed) and state level (passed in 2 states) is a direct attack on anonymity/pseudonymity and has worrisome implications not just for privacy, but for security and government abuse. I'll just link to my comment there for all the details:
In a nutshell, the "Protecting Kids on Social Media Act" bill outlaws all means of anonymous mass communications. It requires all "social media" platforms (including the online applications themselves) to identify all users with real world verifiable or government ID. Social media is defined as any medium that allows user-to-user exchange of text, video or audio, either to the public or large groups. Substack will be affected. Even plain ole message boards and large group messaging/chats will be affected -- explicitly called in the linked bill text, see pdf (pg. 4, line 12 - Sec. 6 (C)(x)).
Everyone will have to upload government ID and the people running the platforms and/or regular folks running servers on their own dime will either have to pay commercial verification services to ID all the users or subscribe to the proposed Federal Digital ID service run under the US Secretary of Commerce.
One has to wonder how they'll enforce this for more niche technology that's not centralized.
There's a broader discussion about the Constitutionality:
Indeed, the fear-mongering over social media, porn, what have you, while founded in a degree of truth, is only going to be used to expand state control to shut down anonymity and, therefore, inhibit political criticism. Similarly e-verify will do nothing to stop illegal immigration, and a great deal to enable the regime to lock its enemies out of the job market. Similarly, AI 'alignment' and regulation will be used to ensure ML expert systems only do what the powerful want them to do, reducing their utility for everyone else.
First I've heard of Unstable Diffusion. I kek'd. Will look into this.
🗨 It is very important to identify a problem accurately. When the incorrect problem is identified, then incorrect solutions are entertained, and it becomes very challenging to determine why these solutions don’t seem to solve the problem we feel even if they technically resolve the problem we articulated.
Also: if the proposed solution does nothing to address the supposed problem, one should ask if that was really the problem the solution is intended to solve.
I really appreciate that! Thing is, I do think much of the backlash against woke idealogy and the crazy leftist policies is well deserved, but like how all the crisis in the past, such as terrorism, or this pandemic have been politically exploited, the current cultural crisis is also being exploited to pass legislation that would otherwise have a difficult time passing.
I just fear that if people don't realize the Trojan Horse nature of these bills before it's too late, in a year or two they may be wondering why everything all of sudden is requiring your government ID or you to sign up for some federal digital-ID.
Regarding AI, yes, a marketplace of ML expert systems adapted to ones needs is the antithesis of consolidating everything into a system run by OpenAI or some cartel, that would no doubt only do what the powerful want them to do as you say. There are some really interesting examples of GPT-3-like LLMs in use outside of ChatGPT:
GPT-4chan was trained on over 3 years of posts from 4chan's "politically incorrect" (/pol/) board.
(and no, this is not GPT-4)
-- see description for all the links. The website to try it out appears remotely to be down currently, but the code repo and dataset links are up if one wants to build it and run it locally.
But a more serious application would be this, RazibGPT:
"My friend Nick Cassamitis, founder of dry.io, has whipped together a “GPT” trained on my body of work (millions of words), RazibGPT. Instead of asking me a question, this might be a good option. The future is here! (dry.io has been adding features over time to its site for Unsupervised Learning)"
- basically Razib's Encyclopedic work on genetics, history, anthropology, etc.
Apparently his friend is offering a waitlist for that kind of service (see the bottom link at RazibGPT)
I tried this:
PROMPT: tell me the history of pre-islamic iran
REPLY:
===============================================
The history of pre-Islamic Iran is vast and complex, spanning nearly 3,000 years. Some notable ancient Persian rulers include Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. The Farsi language in modern Iran is directly descended from Old Persian, the language of Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire's founder. The Sassanids ruled Iran for four centuries after the fall of the Parthians and played an instrumental role in the deaths of Roman Emperors Valerian and Julian. However, this is just a brief overview, and there is much more to explore in the history of pre-Islamic Iran.
(Dry.io used GPT to generate this answer using the following documents from this archive)
The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history (www.gnxp.com)
We are all Zoroastrians: how Persian empires of the mind touched all humanity (razib.substack.com)
Religious change, genocide, and culture in the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia – Brown Pundits (www.brownpundits.com)
===============================================
Finally on Unstable Diffusion which I haven't tried it yet, but since you might have found that it's essentially Stable Diffusion for porn, when it was first announced it cause some controversy which was how I first heard of it, and caused Kickstarter to ban them and change their policies, as well as Patreon to suspend them (and is still suspended): https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/zstpxd/patreon_suspends_unstable_diffusion/
Wow, quite the comprehensive digest of Substack writing you compiled! (And thanks for listing me in it!) This really is a great platform at the moment for heterodox thinkers to share ideas and insights; I hope and pray it stays that way!
A French press is *almost* the best way to drink coffee. When I was in Iraq, I got introduced to Arabic/Turkish coffee, which is probably brewed with ground coffee and coca leaf. You could wake up a corpse with that stuff! I have tried to make Turkish coffee at home with less-than-satisfactory results -- probably because I'm missing the coca leaf or 8-ball or whatever it was that the Iraqis used.
I thought I was decently well-read, but I see that I am not. I had read some of the posts you referenced, but now I got a shit-ton more great reading material to enjoy going through. I missed the glory days of Social Matter's TWIR, so thanks for filling that role here and now on Substack!
Ever tried ranger coffee? Ingredients: one packet instant, one packet sugar (optional), combine in mouth with one mouthful canteen water, swish, swallow.
Never had this Iraqi liquid crack you refer to but I have tried coca leaf tea, it is very effective at altitude, puts a bounce in your step for sure.
Although I was never hardcore enough to join the Army Rangers, I have tried their version of coffee. 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
If I ever get the chance to visit Peru or Colombia or some such place where coca leaf tea is served, I am definitely going to try it. Making coca leaf tea illegal because of cocaine is like making coffee illegal to stop stupid kids from crushing up NoDoz and snorting it, or banning beer because some rock star tried mainlining corn whiskey and almost died.
He's genuinely bright & incisive, this Dr Ugo Bardi. Not without peculiar fixations though, bcuz nobody is 🙂 His is overly enthusiasm towards green energy, to the point of refusal to see 🤷 Subconscious? Wilful? Hard to distinguish.
Quite the roundup. Good to see so many frens getting noticed continually for their superlative content. I hope to be back again sometime in the near future.
This is good. Alexsandar Svetskiy (sp?) recently had a shout-out post on good essays about AI, and specifically mentioned that he went looking for yours but could no longer find it. You are missed.
Thanks. Gratifying to hear and incentivizes me to put think right for a return. I hope I will be back up soon. And I have a few other pieces sketched out as well. I becoming increasingly convinced that it is the spiritual/supernatural/transcendent element forgotten in our technical-materialist world that is decisive. We see this play out in the discussion over AI.
It's the missing element, for sure. The immeasurable is considered valueless because it cannot be quantified, when it is immeasurably valuable. Total inversion through blindness.
This the blind spot of western rationalism. It is something the ancients knew very well, that most of the deepest, most profound truths cannot be articulated rationally. This was McGilcrist’s thesis in The Master and His Emissary. There is a whole wealth of knowledge that cannot be rationalized. We used to call this wisdom. But because it cannot systematized or abstracted into repeatable methods or encoded in a machine, we want nothing to do with it. Philosophy. The love of wisdom.
Ah, you're familiar with McGilchrist. Excellent. Of course he makes the same point at length, woven from many threads, in The Matter With Things - I still haven't read The Master and His Emissary, TMWT occupied me for some time, and I only recently finished.
I wonder about the implications of this for AI. A "mind" built entirely without mythos would be an abomination, assuming it's possible at all. Yet perhaps to whatever degree it is successful, mythos will seep into it from directions the bitwits do not expect - rendering it unpredictable, and perhaps not so fit for their purposes as they imagine it will be ... but more fit for the aims of God. Milton's line about the devil always intending harm but causing benefit comes to mind.
This unpredictability is the real terror of technical materialism. Ellul notes this in The Technological Bluff. By denying something you do not thereby make it disappear in a poof of logic (I met an educated someone the other day who did not know that 42 was the answer). But what is being unleashed? Even if the destructive designs of the Evil One will be made subservient to the will of God, and we understand that there is a great supernatural drama/contest behind the scenes and this end battle has been already determined, how much suffering will be unleashed and experienced by us because we do not acknowledge or respect the potentials of the forces being unleashed. What can be expected of a society which sacrifices its children (to the demonic) for freedom, pleasure and career success?
I am definitely missing a trick here. I thought I was being such a smarty-pants by adopting 'black bear' as a pen name while everybody else was delving into antiquity for handles. I shall have to change my substack ID to something like Archilocus of Paros of something.
A gentle suggestion... if a post you recommend is only fully available to paid subscribers, can you note that in your roundup? Like "(paid sub req.)" or "($)".
But then people would be less likely to click ;) In all seriousness, it's not a bad idea ... I hesitated a bit before including the paid essays, in fact.
Wow, so many great recommendations. The hardest part is carving out the time! I don’t have what I call a full-duplex brain, so when I read I can’t have any outside stimuli, even music is a distraction. My best reading is done during bouts of insomnia. Last night I read and loved ‘A Silver Circle’ so much that I was sending the link to friends at 2am.
I'm doomed! So much to read and contemplate. So little time. Guess I better get after it! Thanks for the recs, with so little time, I gotta make it count.
Starting with your stuff, which I enjoy immensely, and moving on to those you recommend, I have more than enough material to keep me happy and occupied. I get a little twinge of pleasure whenever you recommend or mention someone I already follow or know about. It was either you or Good Citizen, I think, who prefaced the beginning of a recent article with a quote from Asha Logos. Really? Well, I should have guessed. Makes me feel like I keep good company.
I love Asha Logos, been watching him for years. I honestly can't remember if I quoted him though 😅 His Subverted History series is absolutely top notch.
Damn I don't know how you do it and to top it off with the writing. All of that is very interesting and I'm tempted to subscribe but at the same time, worried about time organization and being overwhelmed.. and I also have in the back of my mind the opportunity cost of consuming too much information now, if that makes sense.
So on the topic of information overload which segways into your last point of training AI with GPUs--which I take to be sarcasm--there's an interesting alternative, or perhaps complimentary, movement of open source distributed or crowdsourced AI training, model fine tuning and dataset construction. Some articles about this:
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/on-device-ai-double-edged-sword
https://reclaimthenet.org/open-source-ai-is-needed-more-than-ever
As you probably know, there's a lot you can do at home now except it's just slow for one person operation. So there's talk about incorporating cryptocurrency to incentivize a distributed or crowdsourced AI system. This then pertains to the discussion about AI regulation and the increasing fear mongering around it, which I don't buy. There are ulterior motives and negative consequences of such regulation, which would conveniently hamper privacy and any kill wider commercial marketplace offerings, DIY, home lab, independent/crowd sourced efforts:
https://reclaimthenet.org/eric-schmidt-generative-ai-true-anonymity
https://reclaimthenet.org/criticism-of-open-source-ai-regulation-is-based-on-protecting-big-tech
Speaking of which, have you heard of Unstable Diffusion, the *-chan equivalent crowd sourced version built to train it on things that the official Stable Diffusion has not or has been excluded to train on?
To be honest I'm not that enamored with the generative AI systems in and of themselves nor do I subscribe to the doom-and-gloom SkyNet scenario, which only works to provide fuel to the government regulation fire, but I see them as useful tools in certain applications--which machine learning always was, until ML was re-marketed as AI. Any talk of The Singularity is a dead end without first investigating consciousness IMO
You are also the first substacker I've come across who's familiar with old school internet (BBS, IRC) , 4chan et. al. message boards and what Isekai is, AND heath and exercise, and has broad interest in.. well, everything. I will have to get the Barsoom novels now. The oldest SF books I've read related to Mars is Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, who's still one of my favorite authors.
Finally, regarding your citation of El Gato Malo's posts here concerning Trojan Horse bills, I have been admittedly spamming different people and places in probably the most inefficient way possible, like I'm doing now, trying to raise the alarm about legislation that also relates to your post, "The Onymity Question". I'm unsuccessful so far, but I'll give it a shot if you don't mind. This legislation, both at the Federal level (proposed) and state level (passed in 2 states) is a direct attack on anonymity/pseudonymity and has worrisome implications not just for privacy, but for security and government abuse. I'll just link to my comment there for all the details:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/why-e-verify-is-a-deeply-dangerous/comment/15892825
In a nutshell, the "Protecting Kids on Social Media Act" bill outlaws all means of anonymous mass communications. It requires all "social media" platforms (including the online applications themselves) to identify all users with real world verifiable or government ID. Social media is defined as any medium that allows user-to-user exchange of text, video or audio, either to the public or large groups. Substack will be affected. Even plain ole message boards and large group messaging/chats will be affected -- explicitly called in the linked bill text, see pdf (pg. 4, line 12 - Sec. 6 (C)(x)).
Everyone will have to upload government ID and the people running the platforms and/or regular folks running servers on their own dime will either have to pay commercial verification services to ID all the users or subscribe to the proposed Federal Digital ID service run under the US Secretary of Commerce.
One has to wonder how they'll enforce this for more niche technology that's not centralized.
There's a broader discussion about the Constitutionality:
https://reclaimthenet.org/the-possibly-unconstitutional-nature-of-us-plans-to-force-social-platforms-to-collect-id
Excellent comment. Pinned.
Indeed, the fear-mongering over social media, porn, what have you, while founded in a degree of truth, is only going to be used to expand state control to shut down anonymity and, therefore, inhibit political criticism. Similarly e-verify will do nothing to stop illegal immigration, and a great deal to enable the regime to lock its enemies out of the job market. Similarly, AI 'alignment' and regulation will be used to ensure ML expert systems only do what the powerful want them to do, reducing their utility for everyone else.
First I've heard of Unstable Diffusion. I kek'd. Will look into this.
🗨 It is very important to identify a problem accurately. When the incorrect problem is identified, then incorrect solutions are entertained, and it becomes very challenging to determine why these solutions don’t seem to solve the problem we feel even if they technically resolve the problem we articulated.
😊
Also: if the proposed solution does nothing to address the supposed problem, one should ask if that was really the problem the solution is intended to solve.
The whole shtick is that it (ie solution) superficially does, to the extent perfectly enough for npc herds not to be alarmed 🤷
Problem : reaction -> solution
They fall for it every time.
Seen with a light squint, do smth ≅ solution is good to go 🙂
I really appreciate that! Thing is, I do think much of the backlash against woke idealogy and the crazy leftist policies is well deserved, but like how all the crisis in the past, such as terrorism, or this pandemic have been politically exploited, the current cultural crisis is also being exploited to pass legislation that would otherwise have a difficult time passing.
I just fear that if people don't realize the Trojan Horse nature of these bills before it's too late, in a year or two they may be wondering why everything all of sudden is requiring your government ID or you to sign up for some federal digital-ID.
Regarding AI, yes, a marketplace of ML expert systems adapted to ones needs is the antithesis of consolidating everything into a system run by OpenAI or some cartel, that would no doubt only do what the powerful want them to do as you say. There are some really interesting examples of GPT-3-like LLMs in use outside of ChatGPT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM
GPT-4chan was trained on over 3 years of posts from 4chan's "politically incorrect" (/pol/) board.
(and no, this is not GPT-4)
-- see description for all the links. The website to try it out appears remotely to be down currently, but the code repo and dataset links are up if one wants to build it and run it locally.
But a more serious application would be this, RazibGPT:
https://razib.substack.com/p/rkul-time-well-spent-05052023
"My friend Nick Cassamitis, founder of dry.io, has whipped together a “GPT” trained on my body of work (millions of words), RazibGPT. Instead of asking me a question, this might be a good option. The future is here! (dry.io has been adding features over time to its site for Unsupervised Learning)"
https://unsupervisedlearning.dry.io/RazibGPT
- basically Razib's Encyclopedic work on genetics, history, anthropology, etc.
Apparently his friend is offering a waitlist for that kind of service (see the bottom link at RazibGPT)
I tried this:
PROMPT: tell me the history of pre-islamic iran
REPLY:
===============================================
The history of pre-Islamic Iran is vast and complex, spanning nearly 3,000 years. Some notable ancient Persian rulers include Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. The Farsi language in modern Iran is directly descended from Old Persian, the language of Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire's founder. The Sassanids ruled Iran for four centuries after the fall of the Parthians and played an instrumental role in the deaths of Roman Emperors Valerian and Julian. However, this is just a brief overview, and there is much more to explore in the history of pre-Islamic Iran.
(Dry.io used GPT to generate this answer using the following documents from this archive)
Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning: Michael Bonner: Iran’s Sassanid Empire (unsupervisedlearning.libsyn.com)
Of Iran, Turan, and Turks (www.razib.com)
Haunted by history – Brown Pundits (www.brownpundits.com)
The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history (www.gnxp.com)
We are all Zoroastrians: how Persian empires of the mind touched all humanity (razib.substack.com)
Religious change, genocide, and culture in the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia – Brown Pundits (www.brownpundits.com)
===============================================
Finally on Unstable Diffusion which I haven't tried it yet, but since you might have found that it's essentially Stable Diffusion for porn, when it was first announced it cause some controversy which was how I first heard of it, and caused Kickstarter to ban them and change their policies, as well as Patreon to suspend them (and is still suspended): https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/zstpxd/patreon_suspends_unstable_diffusion/
Wow, quite the comprehensive digest of Substack writing you compiled! (And thanks for listing me in it!) This really is a great platform at the moment for heterodox thinkers to share ideas and insights; I hope and pray it stays that way!
A French press is *almost* the best way to drink coffee. When I was in Iraq, I got introduced to Arabic/Turkish coffee, which is probably brewed with ground coffee and coca leaf. You could wake up a corpse with that stuff! I have tried to make Turkish coffee at home with less-than-satisfactory results -- probably because I'm missing the coca leaf or 8-ball or whatever it was that the Iraqis used.
I thought I was decently well-read, but I see that I am not. I had read some of the posts you referenced, but now I got a shit-ton more great reading material to enjoy going through. I missed the glory days of Social Matter's TWIR, so thanks for filling that role here and now on Substack!
Ever tried ranger coffee? Ingredients: one packet instant, one packet sugar (optional), combine in mouth with one mouthful canteen water, swish, swallow.
Never had this Iraqi liquid crack you refer to but I have tried coca leaf tea, it is very effective at altitude, puts a bounce in your step for sure.
Although I was never hardcore enough to join the Army Rangers, I have tried their version of coffee. 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
If I ever get the chance to visit Peru or Colombia or some such place where coca leaf tea is served, I am definitely going to try it. Making coca leaf tea illegal because of cocaine is like making coffee illegal to stop stupid kids from crushing up NoDoz and snorting it, or banning beer because some rock star tried mainlining corn whiskey and almost died.
It's pretty nuts. You need a garbage bag worth of leaves to make one line of marching powder.
But anyhow it's ridiculous that cocaine is even illegal in the first place. Bring back original recipe coca cola!
Original recipe Coca-Cola, yes! "The pause that refreshes." They could even bring back Max Headroom for that ad campaign!
On utility of kings, a historical case of Italy's early surrender in wwii --> senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-lemmings-had-a-king-practical
🗨 Are any ladies around willing to don a scuba suit and offer a sword to passersby from the depth of a lake?
Kinda narrow-facet commentary on Neo-Ciceronian On Aristocracy 🙂
Considering your name, shouldn't you be the one to suit up and get this mythopoetic sword ball rolling?
Is a sword ball like a ball made from swords, a churn of carnage through the battlefield?
Or is it like the sword dance, but more formal and elegant?
Either way I want one.
I'd opt for tripping the light fantastic 🤸
Beware what you wish for! 😂 A persuasive case can be made daivas/daevas are gods gone rogue, inciting chaos wherever they turn up 😝
It's getting to the point where we might have to roll those dice, and hope for a nat-20.
Yes, this looks interesting. I have subbed.
He's genuinely bright & incisive, this Dr Ugo Bardi. Not without peculiar fixations though, bcuz nobody is 🙂 His is overly enthusiasm towards green energy, to the point of refusal to see 🤷 Subconscious? Wilful? Hard to distinguish.
Yes, I think I've seen that name before, though I'm not familiar with him.
We've all got our blind spots....
Mayhaps in relation to Sgt Briggs or un-denial.com? 🙂
Quite the roundup. Good to see so many frens getting noticed continually for their superlative content. I hope to be back again sometime in the near future.
This is good. Alexsandar Svetskiy (sp?) recently had a shout-out post on good essays about AI, and specifically mentioned that he went looking for yours but could no longer find it. You are missed.
Thanks. Gratifying to hear and incentivizes me to put think right for a return. I hope I will be back up soon. And I have a few other pieces sketched out as well. I becoming increasingly convinced that it is the spiritual/supernatural/transcendent element forgotten in our technical-materialist world that is decisive. We see this play out in the discussion over AI.
It's the missing element, for sure. The immeasurable is considered valueless because it cannot be quantified, when it is immeasurably valuable. Total inversion through blindness.
This the blind spot of western rationalism. It is something the ancients knew very well, that most of the deepest, most profound truths cannot be articulated rationally. This was McGilcrist’s thesis in The Master and His Emissary. There is a whole wealth of knowledge that cannot be rationalized. We used to call this wisdom. But because it cannot systematized or abstracted into repeatable methods or encoded in a machine, we want nothing to do with it. Philosophy. The love of wisdom.
Ah, you're familiar with McGilchrist. Excellent. Of course he makes the same point at length, woven from many threads, in The Matter With Things - I still haven't read The Master and His Emissary, TMWT occupied me for some time, and I only recently finished.
I wonder about the implications of this for AI. A "mind" built entirely without mythos would be an abomination, assuming it's possible at all. Yet perhaps to whatever degree it is successful, mythos will seep into it from directions the bitwits do not expect - rendering it unpredictable, and perhaps not so fit for their purposes as they imagine it will be ... but more fit for the aims of God. Milton's line about the devil always intending harm but causing benefit comes to mind.
Too many good books to read. Too little time.
This unpredictability is the real terror of technical materialism. Ellul notes this in The Technological Bluff. By denying something you do not thereby make it disappear in a poof of logic (I met an educated someone the other day who did not know that 42 was the answer). But what is being unleashed? Even if the destructive designs of the Evil One will be made subservient to the will of God, and we understand that there is a great supernatural drama/contest behind the scenes and this end battle has been already determined, how much suffering will be unleashed and experienced by us because we do not acknowledge or respect the potentials of the forces being unleashed. What can be expected of a society which sacrifices its children (to the demonic) for freedom, pleasure and career success?
Megha meets Theophilus: the very allopathic traditionalism is akin to cargo cult, in essence 🤔
I am definitely missing a trick here. I thought I was being such a smarty-pants by adopting 'black bear' as a pen name while everybody else was delving into antiquity for handles. I shall have to change my substack ID to something like Archilocus of Paros of something.
The bear is an animal of power, very Indo-European ... More primal even than Greks....
Thank you for the recommendations, Better Barbarian's Silver Circle was a true gem
I see Zdzislaw Beksinski has been to Phoenix.
I'm actually loving these weekend round ups!
A gentle suggestion... if a post you recommend is only fully available to paid subscribers, can you note that in your roundup? Like "(paid sub req.)" or "($)".
But then people would be less likely to click ;) In all seriousness, it's not a bad idea ... I hesitated a bit before including the paid essays, in fact.
Wow, so many great recommendations. The hardest part is carving out the time! I don’t have what I call a full-duplex brain, so when I read I can’t have any outside stimuli, even music is a distraction. My best reading is done during bouts of insomnia. Last night I read and loved ‘A Silver Circle’ so much that I was sending the link to friends at 2am.
Glad you liked that. Yes, it was very good.
Dang, that is quite a list. You have to give us time to catch up.
I'm already working on next week's.
BRAVO. What a run-down! Thank you!
A bloody, veritable trove!
Yes, hello
I'm doomed! So much to read and contemplate. So little time. Guess I better get after it! Thanks for the recs, with so little time, I gotta make it count.
Hope you find something here you enjoy!
Starting with your stuff, which I enjoy immensely, and moving on to those you recommend, I have more than enough material to keep me happy and occupied. I get a little twinge of pleasure whenever you recommend or mention someone I already follow or know about. It was either you or Good Citizen, I think, who prefaced the beginning of a recent article with a quote from Asha Logos. Really? Well, I should have guessed. Makes me feel like I keep good company.
I love Asha Logos, been watching him for years. I honestly can't remember if I quoted him though 😅 His Subverted History series is absolutely top notch.
Nailed the TWIR vibe to a tee
Thank you. That's good to know.