Posts by WH
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I’m sorry I didn’t reply sooner Ian. It’s not an easy subject to discuss.
This is a photo of Miron-Aku, a Finnish witch or shaman. The photo depicts a re-enactment of a ceremony to transmit the witch’s powers to an apprentice.
Himmler’s Ahnenerbe embarked on an expedition to Finland in 1936 to investigate Aryan sorcery and paganism. Its efforts form part of the historical basis of the Indiana Jones films.
Don’t get involved in the occult.
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That's an interesting article. I enjoyed reading your Speaker piece.
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I hope the coalition focuses on reducing the cost of living and making New Zealand’s exports more competitive.
The proposed increase in the minimum wage to $20 in 2020 would take it to more than three times the 1990 minimum of $6.125. Consumer prices have increased by a factor of around 1.75 since then. House prices are a different story, of course.
Maybe this is me talking out of my hat – I think I started work on a $3 youth rate – but a $20 minimum seems a little on the high side. We should work on reducing our costs - like housing - instead.
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The NYT’s Michelle Goldberg has an op-ed in which she notes that involvement in the occult as Nietzschean power grab is back on trend:
On a Wednesday evening last week, I sat in on a class called “Witchcraft 101: Curses, Hexes and Jinxes,” at Catland, a fashionable occult boutique in Bushwick, Brooklyn. […]
“If you’re not ready to admit that the universe is chaos, I’m not sure how far you’re going to go,” Bracciale said to the class, describing witchcraft as a way to exercise power in a world without transcendent moral rules, a supernatural technology for taking care of yourself when no one else will. Witchcraft, Bracciale said, lets you be the “arbiter of your own justice.”
I suspect that this assumption of chaos — the sense that institutions have failed and no one is in charge — helps explain the well-documented resurgence of occultism among millennials. Attempts at spell-casting are obviously not unique to today’s young people; the Washington writer and hostess Sally Quinn just published a book in which she boasts about hexing the renowned magazine editor Clay Felker, my former journalism professor, before his death from cancer. Still, magic and witchcraft have a renewed cachet, one that seems related to our current climate of political and cultural breakdown.
There’s a profile of the aforementioned Sally Quinn – widow of WaPo executive editor Ben Bradlee – at The Washingtonian:
Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans—Quinn embraces it all. And yes, she has been in contact with her husband since his passing. Through a medium. Repeatedly.
Some friends have voiced reservations that Quinn is now showing all her cards, so to speak. “Don’t play up the voodoo too much,” one implored. But Sally does nothing by halves. She reveals that, in her less mellow days, she put hexes on three people who promptly wound up having their lives ruined, or ended.
The first, cast in 1969, was spurred by old-fashioned jealousy. Some exotic beauty at a Halloween party inspired lust in Quinn’s beau at the time—and then killed herself just days after Sally cast her spell.
Her second victim was Clay Felker, the longtime editor of New York magazine who oversaw a brutal profile of Quinn in 1973, just before her catastrophic debut on the CBS Morning News. Quinn hexed Felker not long after flaming out at CBS and returning to Washington. “Some time afterward [WH: in 1976], Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in a hostile takeover, and Felker was out,” she writes. “Clay never recovered professionally. Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately caused his death [in 2008].”
Target number three: a shady psychic who, the autumn after Quinn Bradlee was born, ran afoul of Sally’s maternal instincts. The woman dropped dead before year’s end.
Quinn has a new book out: Finding Magic. There’s a short interview with her about the hexes at USA Today.
Lastly, the NYT has a Halloween collection of varsity ghost stories submitted by readers.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to mark taslov,
I don't know whether this is magic or mentalism but it's interesting all the same. Colin Cloud calls himself a 'forensic mind reader'.
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This is an account of David Booth’s premonition of the crash of American Airlines Flight 191. 273 people were killed when a fully loaded DC-10 crashed into the outskirts of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on 25 May 1979.
The case is well-known because Mr Booth contacted the FAA before the accident to provide a detailed description of a series of vivid dreams that warned of imminent disaster. The clip contains short interviews with David Booth and Jack Barker, the FAA Public Affairs Director who spoke with Booth three days before the accident. This clip contains an interview with Paul Williams, the FAA employee who spoke with Booth the day before the crash.
In short, Booth appears to have foreseen the airline involved in the crash, the livery and engine configuration of the plane, the general nature of the underlying fault, the pilots’ attempt to gain altitude and the sharp banking turn just before impact, the layout of the crash site and the approximate date of the accident.
Booth subsequently wrote an entirely discredited book (even that might be an understatement) in which he claimed that the United States might be completely destroyed in 2004. As someone once said, it never pays to make predictions.
Suffice to say, people are right to cut ties with ceremonial magic.
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I like the turntable device on the clip.
I used to live in SE16 - near Bermondsey station, on the river, not far from the Tesco. The place had some great views of the city. I moved to a place in Angel after that, and eventually got a great apartment in SE1.
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Are you saying that the incidents that gave rise to the decision to withdraw US personnel are unconnected, or are you saying that there's probably a rational explanation for the pattern?
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Well, I hope Nancy finds those responsible and brings them to justice.
While the use of a sonic weapon can't be ruled out, this would be an unusual way to test or deploy one.
