{"id":60178,"date":"2021-10-31T07:14:45","date_gmt":"2021-10-31T12:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60178"},"modified":"2021-10-31T07:14:45","modified_gmt":"2021-10-31T12:14:45","slug":"intermission-the-machine-stops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60178","title":{"rendered":"Intermission: The Machine Stops?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Intermission: The Machine Stops?<\/a><\/h3>\n

‘I have seen the hills of Wessex.’<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe Machine,\u201d they exclaimed, \u201cfeeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

– E. M. Forster,\u00a0The Machine Stops<\/a><\/em>, 1909<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Samhain, in old Ireland, was one of two annual festivals (the other was Beltaine, in May) in which the veil between the world of humans and the otherworld of the\u00a0Aos s\u00ed<\/em>\u00a0– the \u2018fairies\u2019 in modern parlance – was said to be thin. Fires were lit, and the burial mounds were opened to allow the dead to move freely between the worlds. Some of the neolithic tombs here have portals which are aligned with the rising of the sun on the eve of Samhain – the 31st of October.<\/p>\n

Neopagans still take Samhain fairly seriously, but in today\u2019s Ireland the tradition has been almost entirely subsumed by the modern American festival of Halloween. As across much of the Western world, Halloween has moved far from its origins in either Samhain or the Christian festival of All Hallows, and has mutated into a month-long deluge of consumer crap, built around a few Hollywood horror franchises and aimed at getting children to buy as many sweets, pumpkins, plastic witches\u2019 hats, Harry Potter Quidditch broomsticks, inflatable ghost toys and zombie-themed biscuit selections as humanly possible.<\/p>\n

Not this year, though. This year, you couldn\u2019t find a cheap, Chinese-made plastic vampire mask in the shops around here for love or money. You couldn\u2019t find much at all, in fact…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Intermission: The Machine Stops? ‘I have seen the hills of Wessex.’ \u201cThe Machine,\u201d they exclaimed, \u201cfeeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,7],"tags":[32053,4053,31091,3237,11402],"class_list":["post-60178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-survival-2","tag-paul-kingsnorth","tag-shortages","tag-supply-chain-disruptions","tag-supply-chains","tag-supply-shortages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60179,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60178\/revisions\/60179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}