An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for March 14, 2021

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Magick. Liber ABA. Libro quattro. Parti I-III [Amazon IT] by Aleister Crowley &al., with Hymenaeus Beta, translated by Alexandr Canepa; Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4, parts I-III in Italian! Also “A new edition of Book Four Parts I-III (Liber ABA) (Italian)“—”The Italian OTO Grand Lodge has published a new edition of Book Four Parts I-III (I) – with Part IV to be published later this year. This is a revised official publication, edited by the Frater Superior Hymenaeus Beta. It’s a significant development in our translation work. Sister Federica, the recently appointed Initiation Secretary General of Australian Grand Lodge had some part in this work when living in Italy and while living in Australia. Historically, this new edition comes out 110 years after the beginning of the project at Villa Caldarazzo and 100 years since the revision of Part III at Cefalù. Italian Grand Master Phanes X° commented, ‘Book 4 is back at home and speaks Italian!'” “The new edition contains new and revised notes, based upon the Lowry Magick in Theory and Practice typescript received via Charles Stansfeld Jones (Frater Achad). It bears most of the missing pieces of the Curriculum revision done when Achad was Cancellarius.”
• “Dream – Explore the Future of Theatre in a Virtual Forest. Bringing performance and gaming technology together to explore new ways for audiences to experience live theatre.” “Performances take place from Friday 12 March to Saturday 20 March 2021. Visit dream.online on your mobile, desktop or tablet and enjoy a performance that uses the latest gaming and theatre technology, as well as an interactive symphonic score which responds to the actors’ movement during the show.”
• “SOLVE et COAGULA [by Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule] Book & DVD Launch. Melbourne Screening with LIVE (really!) music & Ritual Dance April 1st Thornbury Picture House.”
• We Are Satanists by Magistra Blanche Barton. “Preordering is live for WE ARE SATANISTS! Blanche Barton’s new book contains the material from her 1990 out of print original, The Church of Satan, but this is not a verbatim reprint—it’s way more. The new book tells, then continues that story, recounting everything that happened since 1991 and including writings from members, photos, original newsletters and much more never-published material. At over 700 pages, it’s truly a beast! Taking preorders now with a Walpurgisnacht goal—either to have books shipping or at least have final files uploaded to Amazon.” Preorder.
• PLUTONICS JOURNAL, VOLUME :(::) [Vol 14]. “Plutonics: A Journal of Non-Standard Theory is an open-access, sporadically published journal of contemporary theory.” [PDF]
• Crowdfunding: “Tarotbot – Black Edition. A fantastical, charming Tarot deck using Robots. A great starter deck that is appropriate for all ages.”
• Apparently it’s possible to get that close. It wasn’t when I went! (Unless one were a selfish ruffian scofflaw and jumped the rope fence.) Bummer for me, but cool for people now! “Stonehenge Inner Circle Tours.” Oddly, when I went there was talk that they were planning on having it all open for people to wander around in, but maybe that didn’t work out. Also, I distinctly remember they were already, decades ago now, fighting a row over the planned road construction.
• “Pagans lose High Court bid over Stonehenge convictions. Three pagans who entered the Stonehenge circle to sing and charge their crystals, have lost a High court bid to have their convictions overturned.”
• “Hilaritas to publish Daisy Campbell’s Cosmic Trigger Play book.”
• “A Pristine Photo of Kerry and Cara Thornley.”
• The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life by Mark Gerson, unabridged audiobook narrated by Mitch Horowitz. [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]—”In The Telling, Mark Gerson, host of The Rabbi’s Husband podcast and renowned Jewish philanthropist, shows us how to make the Seder the most engaging, inspiring, and important night of the Jewish year.” “The Telling will enable you to see what the Haggadah really is: The Greatest Hits of Jewish Thought. This understanding will enable you to provide your guests with the most interesting, insightful and practically helpful night of the year—with teachings and lessons that will continue to brighten in the year to come.”
• “Publication: Works in Preview.”—”The William Blake Archive is pleased to launch Works in Preview, a new wing presenting designs that are among Blake’s largest and most complex. Instead of waiting until the details of the designs are fully encoded—which makes them more fully searchable but can take years to complete—the Archive is presenting the designs in an environment that enables viewers to enlarge them many times their true size to reveal details not previously visible in any reproductions.”
• “A chronicle of the British establishment’s flirtation with Hitler. An unexpurgated edition of Chips Channon’s diaries has finally been published.” Also Henry ‘Chips’ Channon review – the celebrated diaries, unredacted.Sex, scandal, kinks and queens … edited by Simon Heffer, these interwar diaries by the Tory MP are a masterpiece of storytelling and character assassination.” About Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 [Bookshop UK, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Simon Heffer—”The first complete, unabridged and unexpunged version of Chips Channon’s remarkable diaries.”
• “A Tyranny without Tyrants?” About The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Michael J Sandel—”World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success–more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.”
• “My father was famous as John le Carré. My mother was his crucial, covert collaborator. Nick Cornwell was one of few people who got to witness the collaboration between his mother Jane and father David, who wrote as le Carré.”—”It was part of how it worked: he produced, they edited; he burned, she fanned. It was their conspiracy, the thing that no one else could ever offer him, in which they both connived.”
• “Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of ‘first computer’. Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in sea.” Also “Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient ‘Antikythera Mechanism’. A digital model has revealed a complex planetarium on the ancient device’s face. ‘Unless it’s from outer space, we have to find a way in which the Greeks could have made it,’ researchers say.”
• “How early humans’ quest for food stoked the flames of evolution. A love of complex smells and flavours gave our ancestors an edge and stopped hangovers.”
• “What Is Life? Its Vast Diversity Defies Easy Definition.”
• “Paleontologists Solve 150-Year-Old Mystery – And Discover New Insect Group. SFU-led research team uncovers how fossil dragonfly relatives have been misclassified due to their striking similarity.”
• “Fairy lantern flower has a gaping ‘mouth’ and saps energy from fungi.”—”A crop of delicate white periscopes, each just a few centimetres tall, peek above the leaf litter in a Malaysian rainforest. They may resemble mushrooms, but they are actually the flowers of a parasitic plant species that is totally new to science.”
• “Watch a Super-Elusive Moonflower Cactus Bloom in This Gorgeous, Rare Time Lapse.”
• “World’s first dinosaur preserved sitting on nest of eggs with fossilized babies.” Also “Jaw-Dropping Fossil Find Contains a Dinosaur Sitting on an Entire Clutch of Eggs.”
• “Crystals Discovered in the Stomach of Fossil Bird Complicates the Mystery of Its Diet.”
• “Rare supernova relic found at the core of our Milky Way.”
• Oops. I’m a little late on sharing this. Should have shared it in the previous OG! But, this happened: “A Rare Astronomical Phenomenon of Three Planets Aligning Occurs This Week.”
• “Prehistoric Cave Visits Documented With Footprint Study.”
• “Human origins: ‘Little Foot’ fossil’s big journey out of Africa.”
• “Newly-discovered Oldest Known Primate Fossil Suggests Our First Ancestor Saw Dinosaurs.”
• “The moon has a tail, and Earth wears it like a scarf once a month.”
• “High-status women in Bronze Age Spain may have wielded political power.”
• “When unfolded, these ancient gold foil figures reveal embracing couples.”
• “Your brain warps your memories so you can remember them better.”
• “‘Run The Oil Industry In Reverse’: Fighting Climate Change By Farming Kelp.”
• “Researchers measure the gravity exerted by a 90 milligram object. We’ve measured the pull between two gold spheres, each 2 millimeters across.”
• “Ancient massacre site yields its victims’ DNA. The ancient DNA study raises more questions than it answers.”
• “‘Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth’. Daryl Michael Scott on propaganda and myth from ‘The 1619 Project’ to Trumpism.”
• “Gold and precious gems unearthed in a 5th-century grave in Bohemia. Other skeletons nearby had been looted, but the woman’s grave was untouched.”
• “NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Mission Honors Navajo Language.”—”The first scientific focus of NASA’s Perseverance rover is a rock named ‘Máaz’ – the Navajo word for ‘Mars.’ The rover’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, has been naming features of scientific interest with words in the Navajo language.”
• “China and Russia to build lunar space station.”
• “New Stanford study says Zoom calls trigger our ‘fight or flight’ survival reflex .”
• “This little-known Native American society was once as powerful as the Aztecs and Incas.”
• “Buried for 4000 years, this ancient culture could expand the ‘Cradle of Civilization’. Flooding in 2001 near Jiroft, Iran, exposed the ruins of an ancient necropolis from a Bronze Age culture that flourished alongside Mesopotamia.”
• From the This Is How You Get Cylons dept: “A Dyson Sphere Could Bring Humans Back From the Dead, Researchers Say. This cosmic megastructure may be the key to resurrection—and immortality.”
• “MIT Neuroscientists Identify Brain Circuit in the Hippocampus That Encodes Timing of Events.”
• “Brain State Behind Social Interaction Uncovered.”
• “A New Theory for How Memories Are Stored in the Brain.”
• “In a Momentous Discovery, Scientists Show Neanderthals Could Produce Human-Like Speech.”
• “Fossils of huge Ninjatitan dinosaur that lived 140 million years ago found in Argentina.”
• “Newly Restored Pompeiian Frescoes Capture Hunting Scenes in Vivid Detail.”
• “Extinct atom reveals the long-kept secrets of the solar system.”
• “Can physics prove if God exists? If there is a God, would they be bound by the laws of physics?”
• “‘Space hurricane’ observed above the North Pole.”
• “Once Upon a Time on Mars. A dune buggy is about to set off on behalf of its human owners to fulfill a primordial yearning.”
• “Lab-grown black hole behaves just like Stephen Hawking said it would.”
• “Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics.”
• “Future interstellar comet? Gas-spewing object spotted in asteroid group near Jupiter.”
• “New Technique Reveals Centuries of Secrets in Locked Letters.”
• “Sick Party! The party as site of contagion in Edgar Allan Poe, Evelyn Waugh, and Ling Ma.”
• “A Surprising Treatment for Covid-19 Could Be the Key to Stopping Variants. Household name antidepressants may be helping some patients survive.”
• “How one employee’s exit shook Google and the AI industry.” Tweet—”I didn’t ‘exit’ ‘leave’ or ‘depart’ tho in so much as I was fired.”
• “How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation. The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.”
• “Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you. Its monopoly is stopping public libraries from lending e-books and audiobooks from Mindy Kaling, Dean Koontz, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Trevor Noah, Andy Weir, Michael Pollan and a whole lot more” Also “Why you can’t find Amazon-published ebooks and audiobooks in your library.”
• “Insurrectionist in Chief. How Steve Bannon led the vanguard of the Capitol riots.”
• “Christian symbols at the Capitol insurrection ignited a debate among American evangelicals. ‘God and country’ has become a toxic mix in the United States. Can they be uncoupled?”
• “Forget Dr. Seuss And Cancel Culture – The Real GOP Agenda Is Rolling Back Voting. From coast to coast, the party is engaged in the ‘second great disenfranchisement in American history,’ says one voting law expert.”
• Watch “Q: Into the Storm“, official trailer for the documentary on HBO. “From Director Cullen Hoback and Executive Producer Adam McKay, the six-part #HBO​ original documentary series explores the origins of QAnon. #QIntotheStorm​ premieres March 21 at 9PM on HBO Max. Spanning three years in the making and traversing the globe, the series follows filmmaker Cullen Hoback on a labyrinthine journey to uncover the forces behind QAnon, a movement fueled by conspiracy theories that has grown in scope and political significance, chronicling its evolution in real-time and revealing how “Q” uses information warfare to game the internet, hijack politics and manipulate people’s thinking.”
• “Panda Express staff forced to strip at team-building seminar that seemed like a ‘cult initiation ritual,’ lawsuit says.”
• “Picasso’s anti-war “Guernica” tapestry removed from U.N. headquarters after decades on display.”
• “Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene. Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.”
• “A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother.”—”The good news is that entropy has an opposite – negentropy. As a researcher who studies social systems, I have found that thinking in terms of negentropy and energy can help you fight against entropy and chaos in daily life.”—”Our work suggests that when people keep the idea of negentropy in mind and take actions that limit or reverse energy loss, social systems are more efficient and effective. This might even make it easier for people to achieve larger goals. In other words, yes, you should pick up that sock, and yes, you should improve your meetings, and doing so may allow you to see other ways to avoid future energy losses.” “5 steps for negentropic success … 1: Find the entropy. … 2: Prioritize the losses. … 3: Come up with a plan. … 4: Try it out and pay attention. … 5: Go beyond fixing and maintenance.”
• “Court’s drug possession ruling upends WA’s criminal justice system. In the Blake decision, the Washington Supreme Court voided most drug possession cases in the state. The implications will be huge.”
• “No, Really, Are We Rome? History suggests that corrosive change can be hard to see while it’s happening.”
• “For Creators, Everything Is for Sale. Digital stars are coming up with new ways to make money. Yet fans still hold the power.”
• “Sarah Everard case: Green Party peer suggests 6pm curfew for men to make women safer. Baroness Jones receives ‘deluge of misogynistic emails and tweets’ following comments in House of Lords.”
• “Rich witches. How a flawed logic of economic scarcity and social climbing spurred witch hunts in early modern Germany.”
• “Broom-Scrolling? Assume-Scrolling? Bloom-Scrolling? – what comes after Doom-Scrolling?”
• “Which (supposedly terrible) Frankenstein adaptation should you actually watch?.”
• “Free from Mammon I will traverse the field of knowledge, thinking deeply, and now and then taking a mouthful of the juice of the grape.”—Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), “Der Scholar,” lines 9-12 (tr. Eric Sams) quoted at I Will Traverse the Field of Knowledge.
• Watch “What we discovered beneath the frame | Restoring Botticelli part 1 of 2.” (The National Gallery, London) “This content was filmed in 2019. Go behind the scenes in Conservation with Restorer Jill Dunkerton and Conservator Britta New as they remove the frame from Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi’s ‘Adoration of the Kings’. This video is part 1 of 2 of restoring this painting.”
• Watch “Aztec Chocolate – Blood & Spice.”
• Watch “Zoroastrians in India: ‘Dating my way out of extinction’”
• Watch Iggy Pop’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night“. From Free by Iggy Pop [Amazon, Spotify, Apple]
• I gotta tell you it is always amusingly disorienting in a funny-bone kinda way to see my uncommon middle name anywhere that isn’t me. Here’s a musician that shares my name in a recent music video. Watch “Sruth – Lauren O’Neill & Griogair Labhruidh“.

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