Walpurgisnacht

Today and tonight make up a traditional companion festival to Samhain (Halloween).  April 30 is the point on the Earth's orbit exactly opposite to October 31, and the ancient rituals associated with this night -- great bonfires, the warding off of evil spirits -- are clearly similar to those of Samhain, so there is an obvious relationship between the two.  In modern times this date is most commonly called Walpurgisnacht (Walpurga's Night), although that name is of Christian origin, imposed when they took over the observance and tried to make it their own, as they did with so many pagan European and Middle Eastern holidays.  It is still called Hexennacht (Witches' Night) in parts of Germany.  Ancient Celtic cultures, and many modern neo-pagans, celebrate it as Beltane on May 1 -- the ancient Celts counted each night as part of the following day, so the night of April 30 was the same day as May 1 to them.  The ancient festivities of Walpurgisnacht that have come down to us are both Germanic and Celtic, in contrast to the mostly Celtic traditions of Samhain.

The ancients believed that the ashes of the great bonfires had protective powers, using them to ward off evil from both people and cattle.  The maypole dances were a fertility ritual (yes, the maypole was a phallic symbol -- paganism tends to be like that), while the display and wearing of greenery and floral wreaths symbolized the anticipated revival of life in the summer to come.

The English culture I come from has both Germanic and Celtic roots (a Germanic language and many cultural elements grafted onto a population of mostly Celtic origin), so these traditions resonate with me, even though they do not represent a genuinely advanced civilization as the ancient Greco-Roman culture did.

I've always liked this celebratory video by Faun, the German folk-rock band which often uses pagan themes:


Here is another video of theirs, which again expresses the joyous evocation of the pagan Germanic spirit (though not an attempt to exactly imitate the culture or look of any specific period):


Finally, this more lighthearted entry shows one of the modern witch dances performed on this date in the town of Wolfshagen im Harz, central Germany, where thousands gather every year for the festivities:

Traditional festivities which involve dressing up as witches also survive in Finland and Estonia, where the spirit of the indigenous pagan ways has survived better than in most parts of Europe.

Westerners continue to reclaim our indigenous culture, defying the centuries of persecution.

Drone apocalypse

Warning -- this video is somewhat disturbing:

It actually wouldn't be surprising if some of the major national militaries already have technology like this.  They certainly have weapons the general public doesn't know about.  That, however, wouldn't be the true nightmare scenario.  Governments already have the capacity to do all kinds of horrible things, and life in general goes on.  Some governments can be held accountable by elections, while others can be deterred from aggression outside their own borders by the threat of military retaliation.  There are only a couple hundred national governments, and only a subset of those have really advanced technology, so the pool of potential actors is limited.

Indeed, drone warfare in the Ukraine war has already reached almost this level of hunting down and killing individuals, though those drones are remote-controlled by human operators, not autonomous -- which makes them a more cumbersome tool for larger-scale targeted killing.

But the scenario shown here, where fairly inexpensive killer mini-drones become widely available (legally or not), would actually be even more terrifying than the video depicts.  Pretty much any person would be able to kill any other person, with little risk of any consequences.  It wouldn't be just a matter of whether you hate a particular personal enemy enough to want to kill him.  You'd worry that he might use this to kill you, unless you got him first.  In many cases a pre-emptive murder would feel like a matter of survival.  And you'd know that your enemy was likely thinking along the same lines.  No one would be safe unless they spent the rest of their lives in a heavily-armored bunker and never came out even momentarily (which would probably drive them insane eventually), and perhaps not even then.

However, there are a couple of reasons I can think of why this scenario is unlikely to materialize, or at least wouldn't last long if it did.

First, if such technology were widely available, almost every politician in the world above a very low level would be killed off almost immediately.  For any member of Congress you can name, any high-level member of the executive branch, even many state governors and legislators, there are people out there who hate that person enough to kill him or her if the means to do so with no consequences existed.  The same applies in other countries.  And those politicians know that.  If something like this was on the brink of becoming widely available, I think Congress and similar bodies elsewhere would take whatever action was needed, no matter how draconian or unconstitutional, to prevent it.  Fear of their own extermination would create an unprecedented incentive.

Second, nobody wants to live in the kind of nightmare world these things would lead to.  Some, perhaps many, would fight fire with fire.  As soon as such killer drones became available and the results became apparent, every executive at the companies that produced them, every engineer who understood the technology involved, and anyone else who might even tangentially be able to help facilitate designing or making the things, no matter how personally innocent, would end up being massacred by their own creation.  It wouldn't stop until the knowledge and technological capability to create such devices had been erased from the world.

Nevertheless, there is value in considering scenarios like this.  Technology always has the potential to develop in dangerous directions, and it's best to be aware of such possibilities before actually being faced with them.

Truths and inspirations for 27 April 2026

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[For the link round-up, click here.]

This is an Australian term, but useful everywhere, I think.

Needless to say, the Israeli authorities have already arrested the soldiers who vandalized the statue.  Jihadists who destroy Jewish symbols -- or kill Jewish people -- are celebrated by their own side.

When Trump is gone, this is the only thing referring to him that should be left in place in Washington.  It's the perfect monument.

This is perhaps less applicable in the US, whose immigrants (even illegal ones) have relatively low crime rates -- but in Europe, the immigrant population commits violent crimes at a much higher rate than the indigenous Europeans do.

I keep needing to remind myself how many people don't know about things like this.  The ignorance of most Americans about almost everything outside our own country is pathetic and sometimes frightening.

If this is a "genocide", it's the most incompetent genocide in history.