Bennie’s Saga Continues

I posted a few nights ago about the unpleasant (and very expensive) medical problems that Bennie seems to be experiencing. Well we now know a little more about what’s going on. It’s not just a food allergy, he has a nasty disease called Bartonella that requires expensive super-antibiotics to treat. Apparently this is carried by fleas and he could have picked it up anytime this summer that he managed to get out of the apartment.

For the majority of you who have never met the Benster, here’s a photo from a few days ago, showing him hard at work in the Eternal Feline War Against Literacy:

While it looks as if his entire vet bill will only be $1300 instead of $1800, the meds are going to cost us $90-$100 a month for a few months, so I’ll repost the donation boxes from earlier:





Donate to Isaac and Phaedra’s work





Donate to keep Bennie kicking!”





Donate to the Advertising Fund

Posted in Money, Personal Happenings | Comments Off on Bennie’s Saga Continues

Google “Nudging”

When done for nefarious purposes by people trying to get millions to participate, it’s called “Google bombing.” I’m thinking of something a little more gentle, like a few hundred of you doing Google searches for “Halloween origins” and “Halloween history,” then clicking on the links to go to my Real Origins of Halloween essay (or the Spanish version), then coming back to click on any other good Pagan pages you can find on the topic.

Why? Because a number of religious lunatic pages are doing something like this to get their anti-Halloween and anti-Pagan propaganda pages to outrank any honest pages on the topic.

Go ahead. Copy this post and share it in your e-lists or repost it on your own blogs. Let’s “nudge” the Google listings to reflect real history and scholarship instead of fundamentalist lies.

Posted in Calendar, Feedback Loop, Pagan Stuff | Comments Off on Google “Nudging”

The Ultimate Campaign Commercial

I just viewed “The Ultimate Campaign Commercial” and was blown away. This one should become viral: click the graphic below to view it, then go to their page for the html code so you can post the link on your own websites and blogs.

Click to view The Ultimate Campaign Commercial

Please don’t link to the graphic on the neopagan.net server, as we are heading into our busiest time of year and we don’t want to exceed our bandwidth limits.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Tomorrow’s (10/24) Spell for Democracy

Our original list of 13 spells for 13 Tuesdays has tomorrow’s spell being, “Set up an energy matrix on the astral around all polling places to ensure fairness.” This is a spell that all American Pagans should be willing to participate in, considering the many justified fears about voting machine errors (or hacking), renegade partisans trying to suppress voting among particular population groups, badly trained electoral volunteers, lack of translators for voters needing them, and other threats to a completely fair and honest election.

Everyone in our Spells for Democracy e-group has his or her own way of working magic, but here’s a suggestion for one way that might be effective:

Step one: find your local polling places. Walk around them as far as possible to clarify their boundaries. You might even want to walk around their entire blocks. Take photos if you can. If you can find out where your local election officials will be meeting during the election, visit that place and photograph it too.

Step two: place your photos or other symbolic representations of the locations on your home altar or shrine. Invoke Lady Liberty, Columbia, Freedom, and/or Justice to place an area of their influence around each location, making each person who goes into it become dedicated to participating in a fair and honest election where every vote will be counted and where every voter will be able to cast their ballot freely.

Step three: spend at least half an hour meditating on these concepts and channeling divine energies into the astral energy field around each location.

Step four: thank the deities and blow out your candles, etc.

Step five: repeat steps 2-4 every day until the election is over.

Note: the themes for the next two Tuesdays will be:

(10/31) Offerings to powerful Changemaker deities like Sekhmet, Kali, etc., to defeat any forces of evil who might enter the protected areas and to expose any efforts by dishonest people to rig the vote-counting.

(11/07) Big honkin’ spell-casting all day long combining the first 12 workings (or as much participation as you can manage) & nighttime results vigil.

If you are reading about this exercise in magical democracy for the first time, you might want to visit our Spells for Democracy page here at neopagan.net for some background.

Posted in Magic, Politics | Comments Off on Tomorrow’s (10/24) Spell for Democracy