---[Quote]---
Christmas shopping in the U.S. has been a reliable source of anxiety and stress for well over a century. "As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years," the New York Tribune wrote in 1894.
---[EoQ]---
That surely doesn't only apply to the U.S. - its so very common here in Eurpe as well (except for the turkey, but I'm a vege anyway). And WOW, its been like this for already over 122 years now!

Incredible, to what an enormous extend people seem to be able to ignore their own feelings and join in to this commercial hysteria - or, from a different perspecitve (possibly a magician's), - how they allow the big money and the media to dictate that YULE is about commerce instead of connection.

And most of us, if they listen to their intuition or their divination card or their gods or whatever speaks inside of them, already know after some years of experience that most of the money spent for the X-Mess gifts is lost anyway.

How good that science already found evidence for this and a way to measure it:
---[Quote]---
Since the early nineteen-nineties, Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been doing a series of studies in which college students are asked to put a value on the presents they receive. Waldfogel's main finding is that, in general, people spend a lot more on presents than they're worth to those who receive them, a phenomenon that he calls "the deadweight loss of Christmas." A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. Waldfogel estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss, which means that billions of dollars a year is now going to waste.
---[EoQ]---
Seems like many people try hard to buy sentiment with piles of money and who are somehow unable to realize that it works miserably bad (if not at all). But this of course will not get the media coverage it deserves, cause it doesn't support the matrix and the powers that be.

To some extent, magick works with emotions (that is, some magick does) and if we would apply the same idea there (using money or other material bases instead of our own emotions) and continued to try that for an extended period of over 122 years without satisfying results, how good a magickian would we be?

I think that magick as a path of power (and self empowerment) and as such a path of self determination will most propably lead oneself to question this commerce hysteria (and much more of corse) and to join it only deliberately - and definitely not for the sentiment of it - if at all. And to me it is quite obvious that magick leads oneself to choose the red pill.

But as always, there are so many reasons to do the Great Work that some magickians may find that hysteria about X-Mess fully in compliance with their paradigms. And there are always some who will choose to take the blue pill.

Anyway, all those others who keep applying the same old miserable commerce bound way to reach and touch their loved ones seem to pay the deadweight toll happily year after year - and what a huge price for such an illusion: billions every year! And what a huge gain for those who promote it.

Cheers to all of you!
BlackPete

---

Both quotes are from SOTT's Economic Comentary for Dec, 2th 2006>

Feedback, 30 September 2006:

HAIL Eris! The mildly gravitationally challenged planet formerly known as 2003 UB313 now has an official name. It had previously, if unofficially, borne the seemingly quite adequate name Xena, after the feisty warrior princess
of fiction. So why the change? Feedback asked Eris's discoverer, Mike Brown, whether fictional deities had
been barred. "There were never clear International Astronomical Union guidelines," he told us, "but given that the naming of dwarf planets turns out to be the
most bureaucratic naming process for anything in all of astronomy, we figured there was no chance of some non-standard deity making it through." Not that
this really solves the issue of fact and fiction: "I'm pretty sure that all deities are fictional," he adds.

Be that as it may, Brown and his colleagues proposed the name Eris, and Eris's daughter Dysnomia for her satellite. Eris is a traditional Greek goddess of discord. She is, however, rather better known as a deity of Discordianism
- which is described variously as an elaborate joke disguised as a religion, or a religion disguised as an elaborate joke, and is much beloved, in an ironical sort of way, by computer geeks in particular. Consider this extract from its sort-of holy book, the Principia Discordia: "Is Eris true?" "Everything is true." "Even false things?" "Even false things are true." "How can that be?" "I don't know man, I didn't do it." Discordians can sometimes be spotted by their unaccountable fondness for the number 23.

?A sign that Bill Johns saw in a Hawaiian hotel made him worry that he might be thrown into jail any minute because he is a non-smoker. It said "No smoking
prohibited by law"?

Brown says the naming opportunity was "just too good to pass up". And Feedback can exclusively report his revelation that: "Of course, Dysnomia, being the
daimon spirit of lawlessness, is a tip of the hat to Lucy Lawless [the actress who played Xena in the eponymous TV series], who must be sad to no longer have a planet named after her character."

All hail Eris! All hail Dysnomia! All hail Discordia! Geeks everywhere shall rejoice (unless their interpretation of Discordianism mandates skulking in basements painting their nails purple and not rejoicing).

---

=:-)
Credit to Dave Lee for digging this up (Thx, bro)!
Stay well and prosper!