Thanks for the introductions - it's a bit frustrating that the articles you link to all require a paid subscription to read the whole article. I haven't read enough of them to know whether I want to subscribe, and I certainly don't want to subscribe to all of them...
Is it possible that if you link an article then your paid subscribers can read all of that article, without having to take out another subscription? Relatively new to Substack and your posts (which I am enjoying), so others may have made this point already...
Exactly. And why do I have a feeling that this will be a ruthless knife, whittling away at Substack's prospect to thrive? Is Substack the dot.com bubble catastrophe of a new journalism?
John, the full essay on Graham Pardun's stack is readable to me and I'm not a paid subscriber. If I remember correctly you can subscribe free of charge to that one.
Hit the subscribe button and it will give you a number of options on most Substacks, you then choose your subs level. Most include a free option with varying levels of access.
I shall see you in Dublin, that line up is hard to beat! Jonathan Pageau was the first person to introduce me to Orthodoxy about 5 years ago via his Symbolic World channel. Little did I know that he planted a seed that would eventually lead me to becoming Christmated, which happened last Saturday! Hard to believe that I am fully Orthodox now...just the start!
Thanks for this Paul. Beginning the Great Compline this week, the nine odes, prostrations, incensing... mysterious , powerful, solemn, humble, beautiful …beyond words really and next to me, fully engaged in all of it were children seven and ten. I got a message from their mom yesterday, how her son randomly said, “last nights Gospel was awesome”…
The Covid public health emergency in the USA is scheduled to end on May 11, 2023. Perhaps that event will also bring to an end the foolish requirement that people entering the country must be vaccinated.
That's wonderful that so many people want to hear about Wild Christianity. Now I'm wondering if they'd also sign up for spending a week in a dripping cave seeking God alone. If even a handful of them do after their own fashion it will have been a smashing success!
I don't know if that requirement for vaccination exists. I've had quite a few trips back and forth to the UK, as has my sister and her British husband, and no one has asked for any vaccination documents any time in the past year. In fact, in spite of the supposed vaccination requirements, in my situation, I have never once in 3 years been asked for vaccination documents, not at any restaurant, not at any public space, not in an airport, nowhere. On two trips in 2021 I did have to prove negative Covid status, that's it.
“If you are a non-U.S. citizen who is a nonimmigrant (not a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, lawful permanent resident, or traveling to the United States on an immigrant visa), you will need to show proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before you travel by air to the United States from a foreign country.”
It’s probably applied inconsistently. I’m hoping this madness ends soon.
Yeah, I think it really is not being applied at all. I know multiple non-citizens who have been coming and going without being asked to show anything. I've found this to be common... like last week when I had a dermatology appointment I got a phone call the day before informing me that if I couldn't prove vaccination status, I wouldn't be seen at the office. I did not have vaccination cards, but I went anyway, and no one said a word..... I've had this happen many times, in USA, Mexico, France and UK.
Paul, a response to your discussion with Michael Martin and Michael Sauter on the video conversation, Paul Kingsnorth on ‘The Machine’ and More! < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0YiaMtvXJk >. Extremely interesting discussion, especially – to me – the second half (40 minutes in) on living a robust, pure Christian spiritual life in our time! Thought provoking!
Paul, I'll be posting on my own Substack about the abyss I fell into trying to walk with Jesus amidst what Scott Cairns, a contemporary Eastern Orthodox poet, said of American evangelical Christianity, that it was it was “the thinnest of soups”! I found horrors in that abyss.
Re-reading medieval history, I am struck by the attraction power has to sociopaths, and the endless and transparently hilarious justifications those sociopaths and their courtiers can dream up.
The thing with sociopaths is - once you get past the Will To Power, once you lift the mask, there really is nothing there.
I am loathe to read any new novel for fear it is nothing more than a trip down diversity/equality rights/wokeness lane. Yuck. As soon as I see any of this crap, I move on to something else. Same with newer movies.
Will be at the Dublin event (day 1). Looking forward to it, and looking forward to June in general as it should be warmer. I'm going to spill a dirty secret about Ireland that they carefully leave out of all the tourist literature: it's always cold here. Not like a Nordic cold, but just "this is sort of unpleasant innit?" cold. I went to school in Buffalo, NY (that *was* Nordic cold) and Ireland in winter reminds me of that dreary place; one grey, cold day after the next. Now I understand why everyone here with the means buys a place in Spain to flee to...
Also, I've been laughing about this for days. Enjoy:
Perhaps it is harsh, but it is really annoying when people who are not progressives start picking up some of their worst ideas, antivaax. (Anti-globalization being another case.) Vaccines have been protecting users and reducing the spread of diseases for a LONG time. It's pretty unlikely that it stopped being the case in 2021.
I'm trying to remain calm, but after two years being demonised as a fascist and conspiracy monger, and after six months being locked out of society with no redress, for making a personal choice not to take a 'vaccine' that does not (even according to its manufacturers) prevent people either catching or spreading the virus it's designed to tackle, it is hard to listen to anyone who uses the moronic phrase 'anti-vaxxer', especially when they clearly have no idea of the facts of the matter. If you can't even comprehend the difference between an MRNA vaccine (which is not even technically a vaccine) and its predecessors, for example, it's not a good sign.
You're welcome to read my three linked covid essays on this site and come back to me with something more thoughtful.
Oh, and I've been 'anti-globalisation' for thirty years, too. That won't be changing any time soon.
I'm sorry if people have said mean things about you for your (mistaken, I think) opinion about the effectiveness of the vaccines developed (too slowly, and promoted ham-fistedly). I can imagine you do not see yourself in the same category as Jeanie McCarthy/Oprah Winfrey, but if you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, so I'll respectfully stick to "anti-vaxx."
And I quite agree with you that public officials unduly restricted movement and gatherings. The imposed costs in excess of the benefits although I DO think there were benefits. While not letting them off the hook for their mistakes, I think that our PH experts were mainly y to blame for not seeing s their role giving people the information with which to decide for themselves what actions to take to reduce their risk of infection and of infecting others. Requiring negative COVID tests and proof of vaccination for international travel when the disease was already very widespread and vaccines (Yes I do know the difference between mRNA and chicken egg grown vaccines) were available was very high cost/low benefit, especially for the US restricting entry from places with lower disease prevalence.
But not all restrictions were excessive. I was living at peak pandemic time in a small town in Colombia where a quit wonderful elder care faciality for the near indigent is located. The facility allowed lots of visitors over the Christmas-Epiphany period and about 15% of the old people and one staff person perished.
But I also lay some blame on those (I do not know whether this applies to you or not) who opposed restrictions of movement as a violation of their rights (preventing a person from infecting another is NOT and infringement on the first person's right) rather than that the restriction imposed unnecessary costs.
You may 'respectfully' spout whatever blather you like, of course. You may, indeed, choose to fling epithets at people whose work you haven't engaged with whilst doling out platitudes that went out of date over twelve months ago. It's your choice. But you're wasting your words and your time.
I don't think expressing my point of view is a waste of time. If I'm correct the person reading me may learn something. If they disagree, I may learn something.
I must say that the fact that you disagree with me, comes across a lot more clearly that exactly how you think I am mistaken
"preventing a person from infecting another is NOT and infringement on the first person's right"
Preventing a person from infecting another is NOT something the quacksines actually do, as anyone not living under a rock has known for some considerable time (including the 'health' authorities), and as everyone's favourite 'philanthropath' (Margaret Anna Alice TM), Bill Gates, has recently said himself, having now divested himself of his interests in BioNTech after making a fortune on the back of fools like you (and like me - I took two jabs of the genetic slurry before finding out what was going on).
Also, asymptomatic transmission was a lie, so even leaving dystopian control aspirations aside, there was never ANY medical justfication for lockdowns, 'vaccine' mandates, travel restrictions or anything else (note that while Novak Djokovic was sensibly refusing the clot shot at the Australian Open, about 14 other jabbed players had to drop out of the tournament due to chest pains, and one ball girl collapsed on court).
Not to mention that Covid is one of the most treatable respiratory infections in existence, if you remove government, 'public health', mainstream media and Big Tech censorship and collusion in making cheap and effective early treatments unavailable to the public (even while it has been attested, by a doctor, that 200 of your Congress critters were treated with the drug that they refused to the public, even though tens of billions of doses of it had been given to people around the world over a period of decades without any of the carnage associated with the clot shots).
Talking of which, my own husband (a medic) collapsed unconscious a week after his booster and was hospitalised and referred to a cardiologist. Also, in a tiny WhatsApp group of 5 friends and their families, plus myself, there was one almost-fatal heart attack after the second jab, followed by four fatal heart attacks within a few months of the booster.
You should be ashamed of yourself spreading dangerous misinformation on this site. I suggest you read Ed Dowd's excellent coffee-table book, 'Cause Unknown - the Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022'. It only takes an evening to read. Ed is a numbers man - and the data is incontrovertible, although the corporate 'fact checkers' are trying their pitiable best.
"The facility allowed lots of visitors over the Christmas-Epiphany period and about 15% of the old people and one staff person perished."
They almost certainly wouldn't have perished if they'd been given the drug your Congress critters got instead of being finished off with Midazolam and morphine. One hopes heads will roll, but sadly the Machine is well oiled with evil quislings everywhere - including the judiciary.
Recall that the average person in the UK/US who 'died of covid' (many died of other things and covid was put on their death certificate anyway) was 83, with 2.5 comorbidities. The infection fatality rate in the first waves was 0.097%. Now imagine how many zeros you'd have to put in there if the infected had been given early treatments that are known to keep at least 85% (some physicians have achieved 100%, with thousands of patients) out of hospital.
BTW, 83 is higher than average life expectancy in the UK, so you could say covid was about as dangerous as just being alive generally. But I'll allow you 'dangerous as a serious seasonal flu', out of generosity. You need to educate yourself, before they unleash the next one on us (ETA 2025, once they've removed all national sovereignty through the WHO Pandemic Treaty, which they're working on now).
As if I hadn't enough to read! But it's your perspective which stimulates and is valuable, thanks
Bookmarked for later, thank you!! 🙏
Thanks for the introductions - it's a bit frustrating that the articles you link to all require a paid subscription to read the whole article. I haven't read enough of them to know whether I want to subscribe, and I certainly don't want to subscribe to all of them...
Is it possible that if you link an article then your paid subscribers can read all of that article, without having to take out another subscription? Relatively new to Substack and your posts (which I am enjoying), so others may have made this point already...
Yes - subscriptions, courses, events all get quite costly, particularly when on a limited income. Wisdom comes at a price in monetised machine world!
Exactly. And why do I have a feeling that this will be a ruthless knife, whittling away at Substack's prospect to thrive? Is Substack the dot.com bubble catastrophe of a new journalism?
John, the full essay on Graham Pardun's stack is readable to me and I'm not a paid subscriber. If I remember correctly you can subscribe free of charge to that one.
Hit the subscribe button and it will give you a number of options on most Substacks, you then choose your subs level. Most include a free option with varying levels of access.
That's right - i certainly got the full post
Actually Pilgrims in the Machine is a free subscription - so you can read the whole article:)
I shall see you in Dublin, that line up is hard to beat! Jonathan Pageau was the first person to introduce me to Orthodoxy about 5 years ago via his Symbolic World channel. Little did I know that he planted a seed that would eventually lead me to becoming Christmated, which happened last Saturday! Hard to believe that I am fully Orthodox now...just the start!
Congratulations! May you flourish in the faith :)
Thank you Jules!
Many years+
Congratulations, sister! Welcome!
Blessed news! {just the start - you have little idea how accurate this is! :) }
At least I am at an actual start, rather than going round in circles!
Circling can be a necessary activity. Mine zigged, zagged, went over and under into darkness. Praise God for taking that first leap!
Thanks for this Paul. Beginning the Great Compline this week, the nine odes, prostrations, incensing... mysterious , powerful, solemn, humble, beautiful …beyond words really and next to me, fully engaged in all of it were children seven and ten. I got a message from their mom yesterday, how her son randomly said, “last nights Gospel was awesome”…
keep the fires burning❤️
The Covid public health emergency in the USA is scheduled to end on May 11, 2023. Perhaps that event will also bring to an end the foolish requirement that people entering the country must be vaccinated.
Thanks for the info! I’m especially glad to learn about FPR and their work. And a happy Lent to you :)
That's wonderful that so many people want to hear about Wild Christianity. Now I'm wondering if they'd also sign up for spending a week in a dripping cave seeking God alone. If even a handful of them do after their own fashion it will have been a smashing success!
I don't know if that requirement for vaccination exists. I've had quite a few trips back and forth to the UK, as has my sister and her British husband, and no one has asked for any vaccination documents any time in the past year. In fact, in spite of the supposed vaccination requirements, in my situation, I have never once in 3 years been asked for vaccination documents, not at any restaurant, not at any public space, not in an airport, nowhere. On two trips in 2021 I did have to prove negative Covid status, that's it.
From the CDC website:
“If you are a non-U.S. citizen who is a nonimmigrant (not a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, lawful permanent resident, or traveling to the United States on an immigrant visa), you will need to show proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before you travel by air to the United States from a foreign country.”
It’s probably applied inconsistently. I’m hoping this madness ends soon.
Yeah, I think it really is not being applied at all. I know multiple non-citizens who have been coming and going without being asked to show anything. I've found this to be common... like last week when I had a dermatology appointment I got a phone call the day before informing me that if I couldn't prove vaccination status, I wouldn't be seen at the office. I did not have vaccination cards, but I went anyway, and no one said a word..... I've had this happen many times, in USA, Mexico, France and UK.
Which also begs its own question -- why is the language still being used? To scare and intimidate, I suppose.
In Canada, would love if you share the live event with us here .
Paul, a response to your discussion with Michael Martin and Michael Sauter on the video conversation, Paul Kingsnorth on ‘The Machine’ and More! < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0YiaMtvXJk >. Extremely interesting discussion, especially – to me – the second half (40 minutes in) on living a robust, pure Christian spiritual life in our time! Thought provoking!
Sitting among seers, listening < https://apocalypsefield.substack.com/p/sitting-among-seers-listening >
Paul, I'll be posting on my own Substack about the abyss I fell into trying to walk with Jesus amidst what Scott Cairns, a contemporary Eastern Orthodox poet, said of American evangelical Christianity, that it was it was “the thinnest of soups”! I found horrors in that abyss.
Re-reading medieval history, I am struck by the attraction power has to sociopaths, and the endless and transparently hilarious justifications those sociopaths and their courtiers can dream up.
The thing with sociopaths is - once you get past the Will To Power, once you lift the mask, there really is nothing there.
I am loathe to read any new novel for fear it is nothing more than a trip down diversity/equality rights/wokeness lane. Yuck. As soon as I see any of this crap, I move on to something else. Same with newer movies.
Will be at the Dublin event (day 1). Looking forward to it, and looking forward to June in general as it should be warmer. I'm going to spill a dirty secret about Ireland that they carefully leave out of all the tourist literature: it's always cold here. Not like a Nordic cold, but just "this is sort of unpleasant innit?" cold. I went to school in Buffalo, NY (that *was* Nordic cold) and Ireland in winter reminds me of that dreary place; one grey, cold day after the next. Now I understand why everyone here with the means buys a place in Spain to flee to...
Also, I've been laughing about this for days. Enjoy:
https://youtu.be/pBsvMrOheCI
I hope you come to the us but I’d have more respect for your opinions if you were vaccinated
I'd have more respect for yours if you hadn't just written that sentence.
Perhaps it is harsh, but it is really annoying when people who are not progressives start picking up some of their worst ideas, antivaax. (Anti-globalization being another case.) Vaccines have been protecting users and reducing the spread of diseases for a LONG time. It's pretty unlikely that it stopped being the case in 2021.
I'm trying to remain calm, but after two years being demonised as a fascist and conspiracy monger, and after six months being locked out of society with no redress, for making a personal choice not to take a 'vaccine' that does not (even according to its manufacturers) prevent people either catching or spreading the virus it's designed to tackle, it is hard to listen to anyone who uses the moronic phrase 'anti-vaxxer', especially when they clearly have no idea of the facts of the matter. If you can't even comprehend the difference between an MRNA vaccine (which is not even technically a vaccine) and its predecessors, for example, it's not a good sign.
You're welcome to read my three linked covid essays on this site and come back to me with something more thoughtful.
Oh, and I've been 'anti-globalisation' for thirty years, too. That won't be changing any time soon.
Please do try to remain calm.
I'm sorry if people have said mean things about you for your (mistaken, I think) opinion about the effectiveness of the vaccines developed (too slowly, and promoted ham-fistedly). I can imagine you do not see yourself in the same category as Jeanie McCarthy/Oprah Winfrey, but if you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, so I'll respectfully stick to "anti-vaxx."
And I quite agree with you that public officials unduly restricted movement and gatherings. The imposed costs in excess of the benefits although I DO think there were benefits. While not letting them off the hook for their mistakes, I think that our PH experts were mainly y to blame for not seeing s their role giving people the information with which to decide for themselves what actions to take to reduce their risk of infection and of infecting others. Requiring negative COVID tests and proof of vaccination for international travel when the disease was already very widespread and vaccines (Yes I do know the difference between mRNA and chicken egg grown vaccines) were available was very high cost/low benefit, especially for the US restricting entry from places with lower disease prevalence.
But not all restrictions were excessive. I was living at peak pandemic time in a small town in Colombia where a quit wonderful elder care faciality for the near indigent is located. The facility allowed lots of visitors over the Christmas-Epiphany period and about 15% of the old people and one staff person perished.
But I also lay some blame on those (I do not know whether this applies to you or not) who opposed restrictions of movement as a violation of their rights (preventing a person from infecting another is NOT and infringement on the first person's right) rather than that the restriction imposed unnecessary costs.
You may 'respectfully' spout whatever blather you like, of course. You may, indeed, choose to fling epithets at people whose work you haven't engaged with whilst doling out platitudes that went out of date over twelve months ago. It's your choice. But you're wasting your words and your time.
I don't think expressing my point of view is a waste of time. If I'm correct the person reading me may learn something. If they disagree, I may learn something.
I must say that the fact that you disagree with me, comes across a lot more clearly that exactly how you think I am mistaken
"preventing a person from infecting another is NOT and infringement on the first person's right"
Preventing a person from infecting another is NOT something the quacksines actually do, as anyone not living under a rock has known for some considerable time (including the 'health' authorities), and as everyone's favourite 'philanthropath' (Margaret Anna Alice TM), Bill Gates, has recently said himself, having now divested himself of his interests in BioNTech after making a fortune on the back of fools like you (and like me - I took two jabs of the genetic slurry before finding out what was going on).
Also, asymptomatic transmission was a lie, so even leaving dystopian control aspirations aside, there was never ANY medical justfication for lockdowns, 'vaccine' mandates, travel restrictions or anything else (note that while Novak Djokovic was sensibly refusing the clot shot at the Australian Open, about 14 other jabbed players had to drop out of the tournament due to chest pains, and one ball girl collapsed on court).
Not to mention that Covid is one of the most treatable respiratory infections in existence, if you remove government, 'public health', mainstream media and Big Tech censorship and collusion in making cheap and effective early treatments unavailable to the public (even while it has been attested, by a doctor, that 200 of your Congress critters were treated with the drug that they refused to the public, even though tens of billions of doses of it had been given to people around the world over a period of decades without any of the carnage associated with the clot shots).
Talking of which, my own husband (a medic) collapsed unconscious a week after his booster and was hospitalised and referred to a cardiologist. Also, in a tiny WhatsApp group of 5 friends and their families, plus myself, there was one almost-fatal heart attack after the second jab, followed by four fatal heart attacks within a few months of the booster.
You should be ashamed of yourself spreading dangerous misinformation on this site. I suggest you read Ed Dowd's excellent coffee-table book, 'Cause Unknown - the Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022'. It only takes an evening to read. Ed is a numbers man - and the data is incontrovertible, although the corporate 'fact checkers' are trying their pitiable best.
"The facility allowed lots of visitors over the Christmas-Epiphany period and about 15% of the old people and one staff person perished."
They almost certainly wouldn't have perished if they'd been given the drug your Congress critters got instead of being finished off with Midazolam and morphine. One hopes heads will roll, but sadly the Machine is well oiled with evil quislings everywhere - including the judiciary.
Recall that the average person in the UK/US who 'died of covid' (many died of other things and covid was put on their death certificate anyway) was 83, with 2.5 comorbidities. The infection fatality rate in the first waves was 0.097%. Now imagine how many zeros you'd have to put in there if the infected had been given early treatments that are known to keep at least 85% (some physicians have achieved 100%, with thousands of patients) out of hospital.
BTW, 83 is higher than average life expectancy in the UK, so you could say covid was about as dangerous as just being alive generally. But I'll allow you 'dangerous as a serious seasonal flu', out of generosity. You need to educate yourself, before they unleash the next one on us (ETA 2025, once they've removed all national sovereignty through the WHO Pandemic Treaty, which they're working on now).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDBGGouvum4
The next one's going to be a doozy. Gird your loins and mind your kids.
Thanks for the shout out, Paul, and the wonderful words and ideas you weave.
And the same to you. Keep going.