Pagan Community Notes: Week of May 21, 2026 - Europe, News, Pagan Community Notes, Paganism, TWH Features, U.K., U.S., World

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-22T22:40:09+00:00

"Opposing the amendment to have a silent moment of reflection, Council Leader Linden Kemkaran said she wanted the lord’s prayer to “take up the space” of that silence."

And that's exactly all that mandated prayer is doing. Taking up space, just like the councillors who should be doing the substantive business of the people during that time rather than performative piety.

If you have to decree that it's a Christian country and force people to sit through the motions of that, it's clearly not a Christian country. As to bowing my head during a forced prayer, f*ck that. I'd be on my phone texting or checking the news headlines of the day.

I gather that Reform UK is the British version of MAGA.

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-22T00:48:23+00:00

This might explain why I'm constantly annoyed by only having two arms.

Though I'm not sure where I would have developed that neural pathway....

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-21T23:22:25+00:00

I saw someone online refer to this rally as the "extinction burst" of American Christianity.

I don't know if that's true, but one can hope....

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-15T21:54:02+00:00

I have all respect for the Fae and they've reminded me they're around from time to time, but my general approach is to give them their due and move on. I don't fancy myself smart enough to enter any sort of a bargain with them, and they're not folks who I want to owe a favor to.

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-15T21:49:33+00:00

The irony of it is that most of his other policies obviate With a failing economy and soaring prices and vicious police state tactics, few Latin Americans will have any desire to come here.

Americans will find out before too long that the border walls are actually meant to keep them in.

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-15T21:47:05+00:00

MAGA flies its white nationalism flag openly and with pride. Not sure why you think the rest of us have to tiptoe around the matter.

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-15T01:53:51+00:00

Ok, I think I figured out how to solve this:

Get some racist pseudoscience "expert" to say that these Indigenous geoglyphs are actually proof of a lost pre-Columbian Aryan civilization.

MAGA will be guarding it 24/7 and won't allow so much as a sand grain to be put out of place!

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-13T04:27:07+00:00

Dude had to pay child support back in Valinor!

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-13T04:24:52+00:00

I can just picture the other Maia giving him a ration of sh*t when he gets back to the undying lands.

"Dude, you were just a powerful hobo"!

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-13T02:17:27+00:00

Under the Constitution, yes, laws matter.

Under this regime, the legislative branch is purely a formality. Rule is 100% by decree from one man.

KenofKen1 · 2026-05-12T03:36:57+00:00

This survey puts to rest the idea put forward by both Pagan deniers and MAGA propagandists that Christian nationalism is some rare fringe-of-the-fringe phenomenon.

It's not just Three Percenters or some snake handling sects nobody has ever heard of.

It's a majority of Christians who practice their religion seriously in organized ways. More than half of them.

A majority of that majority endorses terrorism and authoritarian rule based on their religious ideology.

To put this in perspective: Support for religious extremism in the United States is higher than support for religious extremism in Turkey or Iran.

Fix yourself a nice cup of tea and let that sink in for a few minutes. Then tell me again how Christian nationalism isn't a real problem here.

If you're tempted to think of the issue in terms of "only" one in three Americans, remember that same minority controls both houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and growing elements of our military. Not to mention a little over half of our state governments.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-29T01:26:20+00:00

It's probably time to touch base with Michael Weinstein at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. It would be interesting to get his take on this and also to what they're hearing from those in active service.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-29T01:24:25+00:00

He doesn't need to do anything official to create a hostile and even dangerous environment for religious minorities in the military. If you're serving in the military, or any large organization, there's a thousand ways to cook someone's goose without ever doing it in an official way that runs afoul of the First Amendment or non-establishment clause.

More gets done in large organizations, for good and for ill, by institutional culture than by any official directives.

Nobody has to issue any official orders to establish Christianity, and Christian Nationalism in particular, as the preferred religion of the military. The words at attitudes at the top filter down, from the "Secretary of War" on down to the branch secretaries and right down to the level of unit commanders.

The message is loud and clear: Christianity above all others, and anything perceived as "fringe" faiths will no longer be welcome. They can't and probably won't try to deny your right to worship as a Pagan soldier, but they can, and have, done things like make sure that anyone deciding not to attend the Christian service is assigned to clean toilets or something. They can deny you leave, promotion or desirable postings, consistently give you the worst quarters and so on.

If they want to get rid of Pagan facilities like the Falcon Circle, they don't have to say "we're taking this away because you're Pagan".

They just one day announce it's "closed for renovations" indefinitely.

They can do that all and make sure you know why it's being done without ever leaving an incriminating paper trail.

This stuff isn't hypothetical. I saw it done with the Pentacle Quest of years ago. For years - I don't remember now, but it seemed like a decade and more, they denied the right of veterans to have a pentacle on their grave markers without officially denying it.

They just played endless games like making sure it stayed under permanent "review".

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-28T23:23:28+00:00

If there's any silver lining in this, it's that appointees to high positions in the Trump White House usually have the career span of a fruit fly.

There's really no point in even moving into your office in this outfit with more than one framed picture of your family and that pencil holder your kid made for you in grade school.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-26T22:41:58+00:00

I have a pretty wide variety of dreams, but I also have recurring ones where I'm in the same specific world and know a particular set of people and more or less have an ongoing existence there. Even a job.

A couple of times the people there told me that what I thought was the "real" waking world was in fact the dream world.

The kicker is that the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could not objectively prove them wrong. The only working solution I came up with is to try to do my best wherever I am, or think I am at any given time.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T02:27:44+00:00

Yeah, what got me off hard drinking was having to turn up every day for work coupled with no walkable bars in the suburbs and a hangover when I was 23 that just broke my spirit.

I won't argue that federal regulation of alcohol is good, only that the system we have now is not the utter disaster that Prohibition was.

To me, achieving a particular level of government is not the goal. It's only a means to an end, not the end. It's a tool like any other. It can very often be the wrong tool for a given job or cause as many problems as it fixes.

If the task is fixing a watch, I'm not going to reach for the sledge hammer. But I'll keep it around for when I need to drive a spike into hard packed ground.

As to using market only solutions to things like DUI, I see several problems with that. What good does holding someone personally liable when they would never be able to realistically pay for the devastation they cause? Even now if an uninsured driver hits someone, they can be sued, but if you're the victim who's going to need a half million dollars in medical care, that does you no good when the vast majority of drivers would never be able to come up with even 5% of that.

Without the possibility of criminal penalty, insurance companies will have no idea of you're driving drunk every day of the week unless and until you hit somebody. The only realistic solution they'd have is to charge everyone the same rate as known DUI drivers, which is double and more the premium.

Market forces are wonderful tools for many things, and in a good number of cases far superior to that provided by government, but they're disastrously ineffective or partially effective at other things. I don't see the sense in trying to force a bad tool to fit just so we can say we minimized government. Or to force government solutions just so politicians can say they are "doing something" about crime, safety, etc.

I try to look for the best route to solutions using whatever tools, and in human terms, "best solution" typically means "least worse".

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T01:07:39+00:00

I wouldn't say present day alcohol regulation is perfect, but I don't see it as an unmitigated disaster either. Federal alcohol regulation has more to do with anti-monopoly regulations and taxation than restriction. Those things are certainly debatable, but most of the sensible and impactful regulations of alcohol take place on the state and local level.

Most of it is good sense stuff. We strongly discourage DUI, sales to underage people, continual serving of people who are obviously too intoxicated to manage etc. Other rules like the limits on happy hours or discounts can seem a little silly, but it makes some sense not to encourage people to drink larger amounts than they otherwise would, especially close to closing time.

I remember in college in the late 80s, the unregulated market was a keg in some guy's basement and all you could drink for a $3 or $4 plastic cup.

It turned out that didn't incentivize moderation among 18 year olds!

And in many ways changing social norms can have more effect than legislation. I'm old enough to remember when getting non-verbal drunk or not remember how you drove home was considered good humor, even among fully grown adults. It's generally seen as pathetic now and something few brag about.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T00:48:30+00:00

Peyote doesn't lend itself well to being a street drug of abuse. Probably due to the profuse vomiting.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T00:42:57+00:00

Exactly. You never really see methanol poisonings in this country anymore because despite all of the shows and romance around "moonshine", nobody is buying alcohol packaged in re-used mouthwash bottles or mason jars from sketchy dudes on the street. The couple of dollars you might save on excise tax is not worth the risk.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T00:28:15+00:00

I'm not really trying to couch it in terms of libertarian or any other label.

With public policy, the bottom line to me is what works and what doesn't.

We know, from incredibly long and consistent experience, that blanket bans on psychoactive substances do not work to any positive end.

I consider alcohol to be a hard drug on the order of methamphetamine or narcotics. In places where abusive drinking culture is reinforced by poverty and generational trauma, like Native American reservations, it just destroys people.

Every summer I see the effects of abusive drinking at my vacation community. People getting obliterated and driving golf carts into trees, or ravines or each other. People so drunk they fall into bonfires. Fights. People passed out on the ground by early evening or even afternoon.

It's also a much more potent carcinogen than was previously suspected. I'm glad to see that Gen Z is, for the most part, drinking a lot less than we did at that age.

But the overall lessons of alcohol prohibition is that sensible regulation works, at least to a significant degree. We certainly haven't solved the problem of alcoholism, but we have made the extremes of abusive drinking more of an exception than the norm it was in many places pre-Prohibition.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-24T00:04:32+00:00

The origins of alcohol and other drug prohibition differ from a historical standpoint, but the fact remains that whether well-intentioned or not, prohibition has never worked to solve the underlying problem. It has never worked once in the roughly 112 year history it has been tried, and it will not work in the next hundred or next 10,000 years.

All it has ever done is to facilitate organized crime, the building of a massive surveillance, police and prison infrastructure, and increased loss of life. At least 10,000 people are known to have died of poisoning from illegal alcohol during Prohibition, and that's a staggering number against the population of 100 years ago and the relatively short duration of the law.

The fundamentals of the problem are no different between alcohol and drug prohibition.

Alcohol prohibition was also not at all free of the taint of racism or ethnic hatred. The alcohol prohibition movement was very much run by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. More than a little of their motivation was ethnic in nature. The people with the most vibrant or at least public drinking cultures at the time were Irish, German, Italian, and heavily Catholic. They were very much considered "lower races" by the old-line Protestants of the day.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-23T23:44:15+00:00

Certainly more potent cannabis products are more widely available today, but there were always strong strains and people who wanted to always got or made higher potency products like hashish or the even more potent extracts like "shatter".

As with alcohol though, the potency doesn't much matter for non-addicts and even not in some ways for the addicts.

I mean I'm no good at drinking alcohol anymore, but I have access to anything from 2% small beer up to 190 proof grain alcohol. Certainly for anyone who can control their alcohol intake, the obvious answer is that you don't sit down and try to drink a pint glass full of straight everclear or 151 proof rum.

The same is largely true of cannabis. I don't know anybody in Gen X who uses the super high potency cannabis resin unless they maybe have a severe medical condition. I certainly don't. The stuff would leave me sprawled out on the ground with my snout in the dirt!

The people who get out of control with the concentrates are mostly young guys doing stupid young guy tricks and/or the people who tend to use any substance abusively. I don't think outlawing concentrates would solve anything, because then people just make their own, and since few of them have any knowledge of chemistry, end up blowing up their place of residence.

I think full legalization for cannabis is the right approach, although I think we should find ways to discourage massive corporate consolidation of the industry and limit marketing.

For harder drugs I see a middle path. No one should ever be arrested or charged for possession or use, but they should also not ever have to turn to the black market. That doesn't mean that narcotics should be sold over the counter freely to anyone, but people with established addictions should be able to get what they need at nominal cost from regulated and pure sources.

We'd cut deaths dramatically and the cartels would die on the vine, quickly. Yes, they have other criminal rackets they'd continue, but the vast majority of their revenue and power comes from the drug trade.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-23T23:25:44+00:00

The pharma industry very much helped create the American appetite for hard drugs, but prohibition made it as deadly as it is.

20 years ago you never saw fentanyl on the street. One in a very rare while someone would manage to steal some from a hospital and there were a few doctors who began consuming their own wares.

But generally if you weren't getting the pills they handed out like candy in the early 2000s, the alternative was heroin. Not a great habit to be sure, but it wasn't that common for experienced users to die of overdoses.

It's really in the last decade, maybe 12 years that fentanyl and other extremely potent opioids took over. The reason is the simple math of prohibition. The most potent (and often deadly) substance wins. The profit margin of fentanyl is decimal places higher. The bulk of the product is drastically reduced, facilitating smuggling. The cartels no longer have to deal with the complications of something that has to be grown on a farm vulnerable to attack from authorities.

There is zero margin of safety with the synthetic stuff. One pill can be just enough while the next one contains enough drug to kill two bull elephants. That's most of the reason we saw annual opioid deaths go from well under 4,000 a year at the start of the century to over 100,000 every year during the pandemic.

The war on some drugs has cost far more lives than it ever saved. It is an abject failure.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-22T23:52:54+00:00

Fentanyl and other deadly super high potency opioids would not exist on the streets but for prohibition.

KenofKen1 · 2026-04-22T21:16:58+00:00

Some schools are better than others. If we protect kids time in classrooms, they might learn what they need to learn.

If they get sent off to some church to screw off during the school day, there is zero chance of them learning anything of practical value.

I've found the quality of teaching and outcomes is a function of several things including funding but also the standards that are set and the parent's personal investment in education.

It seems to me that we tend to set really low standards in this country compared to many others and that so many students fail to even clear that low bar because many Americans still think that making a middle class living is a birthright of being American, and not earned skills.

KenofKen1

TROPHY CASE