Today at work, I was thinking about Albion's Seed, and just the sheer awe and joy in learning about these early Anglo traditions. The Puritans had so many crazy ones. For their own version of Memento Mori, they would have their toddlers go to funerals and look into the graves etc. Then they would all get drunk. And I mean shitfaced. Sometimes, the small children, inebriated, would fall into the graves on top of the casket.

The Puritans experienced war brutally and saw serious attrition in terms of pop. percentage during King Phillips War. (look at some of the Indian Captivity Narratives). They look positively Spartan in this regard. But they were always ready for battle including in their services. And they would post severed wolf heads around the outside walls of their church. Their pulpit also had a giant eye in the center of it. Fischer provides illustrations. Ultimately, his book gives this almost scifi picture, where you see this fictional seeming society, but tenuous surviving connections and symbols in our present are what makes it halfway plausible. I love Albion's Seed, and go back to it several times per year.

Regardless of where your own ancestors entered this country, or where you settled by tradition or which group is most like you based on "vibes", I think this book is probably the single best book you can read to understand the bedrock of America, and how each group warts and all and their conflicts, led us to the current situation. No this is not an open borders argument quite the opposite, but you can see that this shit is perennial sadly.

@oteycoueye Do you think Hassan Nasrallah's assassination will make Hezbollah weaker or stronger longterm? From my limited knowledge of Israel security forces, it seems like they view Shia threats like Iran and by porxy Hezbollah than they did for Sunni say ISIS or Hamas Last October might have changed the calculus, but overall it does seem like Israel (or the more RW faction amongst them however that divides via govt) fears Iran more than Gulf States and Sunni folks. Why is that?

@oteycoueye I am going to do an in depth thread on this book but can I give you an easy-to-read modern rec on origins of American liberalism/proto-communism? Please check out Otto Scott's Secret Six book It is out of print but it is on archive. It shows the way that the supposed innocuous ralph waldo emmerson types, as well as abolitionists carried the seed of communism a century before Ayers, and co made it notorious

@oteycoueye Have you ever seen the movie Munich or read Vengeance by George Jonas? The movie takes a lot of dramatic license with the truth like the mafia boss from Day of the Jackal who didn't exist, but it is a really wild film with some of the grittiest shooting scenes ever Day of the Jackal is also a very awesome film one of my favorites from the 70s. If you have not watched Munich I'd rec it strongly. The Beirut compound raid scene is up there with Heat bank robbery as one of the gnarliest intense action scenes ever imo.

MKULTRA, the Occult, Gnostics, CIA, and the Royal Family is generally a good filtering mechanism to where you can stop listening. The sort of real power shifts etc are more banal in the present, and the exciting times in the past generally can not be processed by these folks because they step on their pre-existing sacred cows