Bring Back Taboos: A Case for Curbing Shamelessness
Jan. 5th, 2026 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteele In the 1970s, my father used to wear a fresh carnation in his lapel. This was part of his church ensemble: a three piece suit. The church was not elite or fancy. We were casually Protestant and our neighborhood church matched our aesthetic. Nevertheless, getting dressed for church was a splendid affair. My father and little brother wore suits. My brother's suit had its own vest and corsage. My mother and I wore dresses. There was no question of doing otherwise. Everyone dressed up for church back in those days.
My father's job was in a not-great part of Chicago and involved managing a factory. He wore button down shirts and ties until the early 1990s.
Curlers in your hair, shame on you
I am adopted. I have extremely thick, wavy-bordering-on-curly hair. My mother has fine, straight hair. We women always want what we cannot have, and that is why my mom got a permanent in the late 70s. Salons were full of straight-haired women trying to channel Farrah Fawcett. The places positively reeked of toxic chemicals. The hair obsession of the 70s was "body" or the illusion of thickness. For decades, women achieved "body" via perms or curlers fastened to the head with bobby pins. Curlers a.k.a. rollers were often worn while sleeping, which was about as comfortable as the head-suspended-on-chunk-of-wood sleep routines of geisha to preserve their elaborate styles. Taking the rollers out was supposed to result in a head full of luxurious waves. It worked for those who knew what they were doing. For the rest of us, wearing rollers resulted in a wonky mess of uncontrollable, awkward kinks. Women were so devoted to curlers in that era, they wore them into public spaces such as the grocery store, usually under a scarf with a few curlers visible, peeking out from underneath like a lumpy overload of fruits in a picnic basket.
Going to the grocery store in curlers was considered to be legitimately vulgar. We were only to see the result of roller-wearing in the public square, not the actual process. Imagine anything in the ballpark of being shamed for curlers in your hair today: it would not happen. When I go to the big box store in the summertime, it is not unusual to see men and women of all ages in flip flops. Once upon a time, flip flops did not count as shoes. Does anyone remember the signs in every store that said No shirt, no shoes, no service? Nowadays, women influencers go to the gym adorned in a thong and body paint. The People of Walmart, Target, and Costco wear whatever ghastly things they found on their floor that afternoon. I am often the only human not doing her shopping in pajama pants. Seniors (who, like me, grew up in the age of dressing for success) are some of the worst offenders, eschewing decorum in favor of comfort. In their case, I have more sympathy because it's very difficult to get dressed as mobility becomes more difficult, however, I do wish people would at least wear pants that somewhat hide the fact they have been slept in.
Tattoos and regret
Outside the Boomer demographic, the individuals of younger generations sport copious tattoos. My own Gen X is squarely at fault for ushering in the tattoo craze, de-marginalizing skin ink and exporting the trend from biker bars, federal prisons, and naval submarines. I can see why they do it. Skin is frustrating. It is always too dry, too oily, prone to breakouts, freckled, and imperfect. Stamping it like a trunk that has seen every port from Anchorage to Zhoushan hides a multitude of skin failures. My own skin went to hell at age 12, riddled with acne until about a decade before menopause (I quit consuming dairy and it made a huge difference almost overnight). As someone who used to cut herself, I can see the appeal of punishing traitorous skin by stabbing it with colorful needles. I remain tattoo-free; an outlier. My Gen X brother has several tattoos. He got his first one illegally with a fake ID in his teens.
Tattoos seem problematic to me because they go along with a pat assumption that they will always look new, edgy, and fresh. They are a denial of age and aging. They only look vibrant in the first few years. After a decade or two, unless re-done, they fade to a gangrenous greenish-blue. When skin inevitably sags, wrinkles, or becomes ridden with age spots, they warp and bleed. There is no getting rid of them either. Tattoo "removal" is a lie and merely blasts the original tattoo so the ink spreads throughout more skin and hopefully fades to a lighter shade of blue-green. They're forever and not in a good way. That said, I kind of like tattoos when they are kept off the face and neck. I will never get them myself because I don't have the money, I am not into pain, and I could not care less about being cool or edgy.
In light of what I have said here, it may be difficult to believe that I try hard not to judge others via their appearances. We all make mistakes, and it is my belief that some body modifications (such as tattoos) are mistakes. Overall, your appearance neither involves my circus nor my monkeys, so you do you. My opinion is of no importance. Sure, there is a decline of the West going on and the overall pitch into vulgarity and body modification is not helping the collective. Blah, blah, de blah. I have my own business to mind and this leaves me no time to lament how others dress or do not dress for the grocery store.
How we got here: A California state of mind
Hollywood is falling and fading as the Zionist kompromat System behind it struggles to maintain its former secrecy and therefore influence. The Zionist citadel's decline is self-evident in California. The former La La Land paradise has now been exposed for it's fake beauty and infinite depravity.
California once broke taboos in a good way. It used to set trends in healthy eating, and it was largely responsible for changing the American Diet from beige, brown, and white to green, orange, red, and blue. California was a blooming desert. You moved there if you wanted to be your gay self without Evangelist freaks gunning after you while they envisioned every sex act you did or did not do in their puerile, tormented heads. California was the vanguard of what was cool, and its bevy of stars moved and shook the world.
Now? Not so much. California has become an open sewer and a macabre exhibit of wealth extremes. On one end, we have the homeless, whose excrement and piss befouls every formerly lovely landmark and vista. Abandoned stores in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs reek with the miasma of human addiction and waste. What was once safe and beautiful is now dangerous and monstrous. California's medium and large size towns are a real-life zombie apocalypse of addicts who will gleefully stab a child to death, before or after violently raping her, all because she could be traded for drugs. The streets are not the only place from which regular Californians must hide their kids. Every casting call to become a big star is a potential chute down to an abyss of literal cannibalism and modernized Moloch rituals. California is the place you go when you want to sell your child into lucrative rape slavery: the examples of Heather O'Rourke, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, Jeanette McCurdy, Ariana Grande, and Millie Bobbie Brown are merely the few we know a thing or two about.
California has long since been a place where anything goes has morphed into everything goes wrong. California is what happens when taboo breaking becomes endemic.
Breaking taboos is addictive
The System has always run on pedophilia because pedophilia is the ultimate taboo. To molest a child is to cross a boundary. The result, if not the goal, is to break the child and ruin him or her for an entire lifetime. Molesting a child detonates one's own relationship with the Divine and possibly the child's as well. You cannot achieve a level of subtle consciousness that aligns with God or the gods and also be a child molester. The only thing that happens (I'm looking at you, Mr. Crowley) is that you endear yourself to demonic beings that resemble your own level of consciousness for as long as it takes to extricate yourself from that level of consciousness.
The pornographers are especially damned, and I sense their multi-lifetime consequences are especially dire, ranking right up (or down) there with chemtrail pilots. I am saving up my speculations on what happens to those guys for a future essay.
When a little boy watches porn, it replaces his first sexual experience with the brain equivalent of a snort of meth. Innocent bouts of kissy face or playing doctor with the neighbor kid are replaced with dark, solitary forays into human trafficking horror. Before long, he is pumped full of images of toddlers being gang-banged and mentally broken women who have learned to fetishize eating their own vomit and poop. He is sexually ruined before he begins. In the school system, he is swallowed up by the allopathic medicine trans racket which tells him he is a sissy and exploits his family for every last cent. If he is especially unlucky, he is sucked into the grist mill of full castration and hormones previously reserved for adult sex offenders. His family is milked so they can pay endlessly (through wealth and debt) for his treatments, therapies, drugs, and counseling as he is transformed into an expensive eunuch and lifelong medical dependent. It is as if society asked itself "What is the worst thing that could happen if one of the worst taboos was removed?" and the answer was child sacrifice.
Somewhere between the lands of proper, trad wife suburbs and the open air child marketplace of LA's Skid Row, there is a balance where taboos still thrive yet are not permitted to take over. Unlike certain Christian morons, I am never going to insist that my personal brand of middle-aged, Midwestern deportment is One Size Fits All. I will not Karen-scream into the empty air that laws should be made, religions should be enforced, and that others should comply. As an older person, I can simply caution the young that youth and its rebellion do not necessarily last forever, and that they should think ahead a bit.
The thinness taboo
Ozempic and GLP-1s have ushered in a grotesque new age of people (mostly women) intent on proving you can never be too rich or too thin. Ariana Grande inherited the sickening legacy of starvation and sexual abuse trailblazed by Wicked sequel star Judy Garland. Judy had to show off a corseted, 22-inch waistline achieved by her mother forcing her to smoke packs a day as a teenager; Ariana stripped her body down to its skeleton and had gemstones glued to her jutting clavicles. If it was a competition of which singer could be more naked, abused, and stripped down, Ariana seems to have won. I refuse to watch Wicked: For Good because of what other people who have watched it have said. The actresses are so thin, they say, that it is the only thing you can possibly notice about the film. I have no need to watch actresses diet themselves to death. The plan for Ariana Grande is apparently to skeletize herself into an early grave like Karen Carpenter before her. I have no need to put those images into my brain.
There is nothing wrong with breaking taboos per se -- rules were meant to be broken. The problems reliably occur when we swing to either extreme of the taboo spectrum -- that land of prudish fear where every arbitrarily-decided rule must be followed to the letter, no matter how absurd. The opposite extreme and the one we find ourselves in is limitless depravity, where no caution is ever worth observing and every newborn child is a candidate for ritualized cannibal annihilation. It is the second extreme that Hollywood has tried to promote as the only garden path worth traipsing. Much to the chagrin of Zionist elites, commoners everywhere have decided that the Cabal's boundary pushing is not their cup of tea. Having run out of reasonable boundaries to push long ago, the Cabal now realizes that appetites for shock and awe have been greatly overestimated. This is bad, bad news for Hollywood.
MOAR!
When you lack both decency and common sense, doubling and tripling down on past edgelord strategies that used to bring success is your only route. You become a hammer who can only see nails. The music and film industries had incredible reach back in the day. Viable alternatives were well-kept secrets. Elvis and the Beatles defined eras and aesthetics. Star Wars captivated and colonized imaginations. Propaganda and advertising held illimitable dominion over all.
Elvis seduced young girls (he actually married one of them) as he unapologetically swung his hips. The suggestion of what a gyrating pelvis might do in its private time was more than enough to launch his career via the frenzies of panty-throwing teenagers. The Beatles scandalized by marrying political rebellion, including John Lennon's union with professional idiot, Yoko Ono. Spielberg pushed envelopes one by one, normalizing single motherhood with ET and hard-drinking teen sluttery in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Along the way, it is alleged that he caused the death of little Heather O'Rourke because of his predilection for stuffing large objects up her behind.
The 2020s brought Peak Pussy, a time in which the number one songs on television and radio pattered on about cooch slime. Patsys wore pink hats to protest Trump's latest psyop, Gywneth Paltrow sold a candle that supposedly smelled like her vagina (my husband hilariously remarks that a wick in an open can of sardines would be the perfect substitute), and men and boys volunteered for the full castration and quasi-feminine reconstruction I mentioned earlier in this essay. Obsession with sex and its organs became the true New Normal. Pornhub receives 800 visits per second and the average age to enter the addiction gateway of porn is 13.
Replicating titillation on an industrial scale backfired: young people are turning away from human companionship in record numbers, choosing porn and AI instead. The System is now in a slow-scale disaster where it repeatedly shoots itself in both feet. It needs loads of human babies to survive, not just for human sacrifice but for the long, slow drain of consumers to work to death on its behalf. Porn and AI addicted drudges who cannot afford to feed or house themselves don't have loads of babies. You would think they would have seen this coming!
How did she get those dead eyes?
In 2024, Matthew McConaughey appeared to age about 50 years over overnight, going from his usual self to a withered, haunted, grim reaper/Cryptkeeper of a man. Jenna Ortega suffered a similar fate during the promotion of the second leg of Addam's Family remake, Wednesday. Nobody knows the trouble they've seen, but I suspect they woke up in a mutilation theater and/or saw kids raped and butchered in front of them. Hollywood is extremely scary. Many also speculate that Kris Jenner, that freakish ghoul who wears her own daughters as a costume, shaved of 50 years by juicing the adrenochrome of infants and children. We all know that looking exactly 26 when you are 70 is not possible via surgery and fillers, including "good" deep plane face lifts and skin resurfacing. In 2016, when normies laughed at the conspiracist fables of Hillary and Huma tag teaming and wearing the disembodied face of a child for laughs and spite, those of us who knew sat tight. In 2026, normies found such unpleasant information much harder to shove under the rug.
Hollywood banked on normie ignorance while pushing a narrative that all taboos needed to be broken. They made us jaded in their own image and expected us to remain innocent in thought. Big mistake. Not only does taboo breaking raise the threshold of the thrill it provides, it is actually a phenomenon that can become old and tired.
One of the many reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation is that I had no desire to police another human being in order to keep him or her from his or her own worst instincts. Parenting is already exhausting enough without having to consume every last bit of media in advance to your children consuming it, just in case. I don't have time to pre-digest and screen children's media, let alone the adult stuff that slips in through the cracks.
Future platforms that churn out wholesome, creative, fun, yet moderate content are going to make bank. A YouTube whose algorithm never strays into Tung Tung beating Ballerina Cappucina into shards is going to be the next big thing, and Hollywood types will stew in bitter jealousy. Movie studios that never release a sequel, prequel, or unoriginal franchise but instead showcase a steady rotation of unique, homegrown talent will sweep the Disneys and Sonys into the dustbins of history. Naturally, these platforms are not even half-baked at the time of this writing. I pray for them and wish them well. Until then, I will trudge ever onward in my path of moderation and rare to occasional thrill seeking.
My father's job was in a not-great part of Chicago and involved managing a factory. He wore button down shirts and ties until the early 1990s.
Curlers in your hair, shame on you
I am adopted. I have extremely thick, wavy-bordering-on-curly hair. My mother has fine, straight hair. We women always want what we cannot have, and that is why my mom got a permanent in the late 70s. Salons were full of straight-haired women trying to channel Farrah Fawcett. The places positively reeked of toxic chemicals. The hair obsession of the 70s was "body" or the illusion of thickness. For decades, women achieved "body" via perms or curlers fastened to the head with bobby pins. Curlers a.k.a. rollers were often worn while sleeping, which was about as comfortable as the head-suspended-on-chunk-of-wood sleep routines of geisha to preserve their elaborate styles. Taking the rollers out was supposed to result in a head full of luxurious waves. It worked for those who knew what they were doing. For the rest of us, wearing rollers resulted in a wonky mess of uncontrollable, awkward kinks. Women were so devoted to curlers in that era, they wore them into public spaces such as the grocery store, usually under a scarf with a few curlers visible, peeking out from underneath like a lumpy overload of fruits in a picnic basket.
Going to the grocery store in curlers was considered to be legitimately vulgar. We were only to see the result of roller-wearing in the public square, not the actual process. Imagine anything in the ballpark of being shamed for curlers in your hair today: it would not happen. When I go to the big box store in the summertime, it is not unusual to see men and women of all ages in flip flops. Once upon a time, flip flops did not count as shoes. Does anyone remember the signs in every store that said No shirt, no shoes, no service? Nowadays, women influencers go to the gym adorned in a thong and body paint. The People of Walmart, Target, and Costco wear whatever ghastly things they found on their floor that afternoon. I am often the only human not doing her shopping in pajama pants. Seniors (who, like me, grew up in the age of dressing for success) are some of the worst offenders, eschewing decorum in favor of comfort. In their case, I have more sympathy because it's very difficult to get dressed as mobility becomes more difficult, however, I do wish people would at least wear pants that somewhat hide the fact they have been slept in.
Tattoos and regret
Outside the Boomer demographic, the individuals of younger generations sport copious tattoos. My own Gen X is squarely at fault for ushering in the tattoo craze, de-marginalizing skin ink and exporting the trend from biker bars, federal prisons, and naval submarines. I can see why they do it. Skin is frustrating. It is always too dry, too oily, prone to breakouts, freckled, and imperfect. Stamping it like a trunk that has seen every port from Anchorage to Zhoushan hides a multitude of skin failures. My own skin went to hell at age 12, riddled with acne until about a decade before menopause (I quit consuming dairy and it made a huge difference almost overnight). As someone who used to cut herself, I can see the appeal of punishing traitorous skin by stabbing it with colorful needles. I remain tattoo-free; an outlier. My Gen X brother has several tattoos. He got his first one illegally with a fake ID in his teens.
Tattoos seem problematic to me because they go along with a pat assumption that they will always look new, edgy, and fresh. They are a denial of age and aging. They only look vibrant in the first few years. After a decade or two, unless re-done, they fade to a gangrenous greenish-blue. When skin inevitably sags, wrinkles, or becomes ridden with age spots, they warp and bleed. There is no getting rid of them either. Tattoo "removal" is a lie and merely blasts the original tattoo so the ink spreads throughout more skin and hopefully fades to a lighter shade of blue-green. They're forever and not in a good way. That said, I kind of like tattoos when they are kept off the face and neck. I will never get them myself because I don't have the money, I am not into pain, and I could not care less about being cool or edgy.
In light of what I have said here, it may be difficult to believe that I try hard not to judge others via their appearances. We all make mistakes, and it is my belief that some body modifications (such as tattoos) are mistakes. Overall, your appearance neither involves my circus nor my monkeys, so you do you. My opinion is of no importance. Sure, there is a decline of the West going on and the overall pitch into vulgarity and body modification is not helping the collective. Blah, blah, de blah. I have my own business to mind and this leaves me no time to lament how others dress or do not dress for the grocery store.
How we got here: A California state of mind
Hollywood is falling and fading as the Zionist kompromat System behind it struggles to maintain its former secrecy and therefore influence. The Zionist citadel's decline is self-evident in California. The former La La Land paradise has now been exposed for it's fake beauty and infinite depravity.
California once broke taboos in a good way. It used to set trends in healthy eating, and it was largely responsible for changing the American Diet from beige, brown, and white to green, orange, red, and blue. California was a blooming desert. You moved there if you wanted to be your gay self without Evangelist freaks gunning after you while they envisioned every sex act you did or did not do in their puerile, tormented heads. California was the vanguard of what was cool, and its bevy of stars moved and shook the world.
Now? Not so much. California has become an open sewer and a macabre exhibit of wealth extremes. On one end, we have the homeless, whose excrement and piss befouls every formerly lovely landmark and vista. Abandoned stores in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs reek with the miasma of human addiction and waste. What was once safe and beautiful is now dangerous and monstrous. California's medium and large size towns are a real-life zombie apocalypse of addicts who will gleefully stab a child to death, before or after violently raping her, all because she could be traded for drugs. The streets are not the only place from which regular Californians must hide their kids. Every casting call to become a big star is a potential chute down to an abyss of literal cannibalism and modernized Moloch rituals. California is the place you go when you want to sell your child into lucrative rape slavery: the examples of Heather O'Rourke, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim, Jeanette McCurdy, Ariana Grande, and Millie Bobbie Brown are merely the few we know a thing or two about.
California has long since been a place where anything goes has morphed into everything goes wrong. California is what happens when taboo breaking becomes endemic.
Breaking taboos is addictive
The System has always run on pedophilia because pedophilia is the ultimate taboo. To molest a child is to cross a boundary. The result, if not the goal, is to break the child and ruin him or her for an entire lifetime. Molesting a child detonates one's own relationship with the Divine and possibly the child's as well. You cannot achieve a level of subtle consciousness that aligns with God or the gods and also be a child molester. The only thing that happens (I'm looking at you, Mr. Crowley) is that you endear yourself to demonic beings that resemble your own level of consciousness for as long as it takes to extricate yourself from that level of consciousness.
The pornographers are especially damned, and I sense their multi-lifetime consequences are especially dire, ranking right up (or down) there with chemtrail pilots. I am saving up my speculations on what happens to those guys for a future essay.
When a little boy watches porn, it replaces his first sexual experience with the brain equivalent of a snort of meth. Innocent bouts of kissy face or playing doctor with the neighbor kid are replaced with dark, solitary forays into human trafficking horror. Before long, he is pumped full of images of toddlers being gang-banged and mentally broken women who have learned to fetishize eating their own vomit and poop. He is sexually ruined before he begins. In the school system, he is swallowed up by the allopathic medicine trans racket which tells him he is a sissy and exploits his family for every last cent. If he is especially unlucky, he is sucked into the grist mill of full castration and hormones previously reserved for adult sex offenders. His family is milked so they can pay endlessly (through wealth and debt) for his treatments, therapies, drugs, and counseling as he is transformed into an expensive eunuch and lifelong medical dependent. It is as if society asked itself "What is the worst thing that could happen if one of the worst taboos was removed?" and the answer was child sacrifice.
Somewhere between the lands of proper, trad wife suburbs and the open air child marketplace of LA's Skid Row, there is a balance where taboos still thrive yet are not permitted to take over. Unlike certain Christian morons, I am never going to insist that my personal brand of middle-aged, Midwestern deportment is One Size Fits All. I will not Karen-scream into the empty air that laws should be made, religions should be enforced, and that others should comply. As an older person, I can simply caution the young that youth and its rebellion do not necessarily last forever, and that they should think ahead a bit.
The thinness taboo
Ozempic and GLP-1s have ushered in a grotesque new age of people (mostly women) intent on proving you can never be too rich or too thin. Ariana Grande inherited the sickening legacy of starvation and sexual abuse trailblazed by Wicked sequel star Judy Garland. Judy had to show off a corseted, 22-inch waistline achieved by her mother forcing her to smoke packs a day as a teenager; Ariana stripped her body down to its skeleton and had gemstones glued to her jutting clavicles. If it was a competition of which singer could be more naked, abused, and stripped down, Ariana seems to have won. I refuse to watch Wicked: For Good because of what other people who have watched it have said. The actresses are so thin, they say, that it is the only thing you can possibly notice about the film. I have no need to watch actresses diet themselves to death. The plan for Ariana Grande is apparently to skeletize herself into an early grave like Karen Carpenter before her. I have no need to put those images into my brain.
There is nothing wrong with breaking taboos per se -- rules were meant to be broken. The problems reliably occur when we swing to either extreme of the taboo spectrum -- that land of prudish fear where every arbitrarily-decided rule must be followed to the letter, no matter how absurd. The opposite extreme and the one we find ourselves in is limitless depravity, where no caution is ever worth observing and every newborn child is a candidate for ritualized cannibal annihilation. It is the second extreme that Hollywood has tried to promote as the only garden path worth traipsing. Much to the chagrin of Zionist elites, commoners everywhere have decided that the Cabal's boundary pushing is not their cup of tea. Having run out of reasonable boundaries to push long ago, the Cabal now realizes that appetites for shock and awe have been greatly overestimated. This is bad, bad news for Hollywood.
MOAR!
When you lack both decency and common sense, doubling and tripling down on past edgelord strategies that used to bring success is your only route. You become a hammer who can only see nails. The music and film industries had incredible reach back in the day. Viable alternatives were well-kept secrets. Elvis and the Beatles defined eras and aesthetics. Star Wars captivated and colonized imaginations. Propaganda and advertising held illimitable dominion over all.
Elvis seduced young girls (he actually married one of them) as he unapologetically swung his hips. The suggestion of what a gyrating pelvis might do in its private time was more than enough to launch his career via the frenzies of panty-throwing teenagers. The Beatles scandalized by marrying political rebellion, including John Lennon's union with professional idiot, Yoko Ono. Spielberg pushed envelopes one by one, normalizing single motherhood with ET and hard-drinking teen sluttery in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Along the way, it is alleged that he caused the death of little Heather O'Rourke because of his predilection for stuffing large objects up her behind.
The 2020s brought Peak Pussy, a time in which the number one songs on television and radio pattered on about cooch slime. Patsys wore pink hats to protest Trump's latest psyop, Gywneth Paltrow sold a candle that supposedly smelled like her vagina (my husband hilariously remarks that a wick in an open can of sardines would be the perfect substitute), and men and boys volunteered for the full castration and quasi-feminine reconstruction I mentioned earlier in this essay. Obsession with sex and its organs became the true New Normal. Pornhub receives 800 visits per second and the average age to enter the addiction gateway of porn is 13.
Replicating titillation on an industrial scale backfired: young people are turning away from human companionship in record numbers, choosing porn and AI instead. The System is now in a slow-scale disaster where it repeatedly shoots itself in both feet. It needs loads of human babies to survive, not just for human sacrifice but for the long, slow drain of consumers to work to death on its behalf. Porn and AI addicted drudges who cannot afford to feed or house themselves don't have loads of babies. You would think they would have seen this coming!
How did she get those dead eyes?
In 2024, Matthew McConaughey appeared to age about 50 years over overnight, going from his usual self to a withered, haunted, grim reaper/Cryptkeeper of a man. Jenna Ortega suffered a similar fate during the promotion of the second leg of Addam's Family remake, Wednesday. Nobody knows the trouble they've seen, but I suspect they woke up in a mutilation theater and/or saw kids raped and butchered in front of them. Hollywood is extremely scary. Many also speculate that Kris Jenner, that freakish ghoul who wears her own daughters as a costume, shaved of 50 years by juicing the adrenochrome of infants and children. We all know that looking exactly 26 when you are 70 is not possible via surgery and fillers, including "good" deep plane face lifts and skin resurfacing. In 2016, when normies laughed at the conspiracist fables of Hillary and Huma tag teaming and wearing the disembodied face of a child for laughs and spite, those of us who knew sat tight. In 2026, normies found such unpleasant information much harder to shove under the rug.
Hollywood banked on normie ignorance while pushing a narrative that all taboos needed to be broken. They made us jaded in their own image and expected us to remain innocent in thought. Big mistake. Not only does taboo breaking raise the threshold of the thrill it provides, it is actually a phenomenon that can become old and tired.
One of the many reasons I chose not to have children in this incarnation is that I had no desire to police another human being in order to keep him or her from his or her own worst instincts. Parenting is already exhausting enough without having to consume every last bit of media in advance to your children consuming it, just in case. I don't have time to pre-digest and screen children's media, let alone the adult stuff that slips in through the cracks.
Future platforms that churn out wholesome, creative, fun, yet moderate content are going to make bank. A YouTube whose algorithm never strays into Tung Tung beating Ballerina Cappucina into shards is going to be the next big thing, and Hollywood types will stew in bitter jealousy. Movie studios that never release a sequel, prequel, or unoriginal franchise but instead showcase a steady rotation of unique, homegrown talent will sweep the Disneys and Sonys into the dustbins of history. Naturally, these platforms are not even half-baked at the time of this writing. I pray for them and wish them well. Until then, I will trudge ever onward in my path of moderation and rare to occasional thrill seeking.
Things are piling up very quickly for me and so I've decided to go on hiatus here and on my blog for the rest of January. I expect to be posting again by February 1. I'll log on semiregularly to put through comments, so the Frugal First Friday and Covid Open Posts can continue as before. have a good month, and I'll be back in due time! 
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Now that the last hours of 2025 are trickling away, it occurs to me that some readers may want a little good luck in the coming year. American folk magic has some options to suggest with this in mind. The first things you eat tomorrow should be: 
We are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted 
It's almost midnight and
For your holiday listening pleasure, here's a new podcast of mine. It's another appearance on Hermitix with the ever-interesting James Ellis as host. Our topic is the magical work and writings of W.B. Yeats. Give it a listen: 
Update: and in case you're not yet tired of listening to my dulcet voice, here's a second podcast, just out, on Therapeutic Astrology podcast with host Mannah Guldager. The theme is my recent book Revisioning the Tree of Life: Here's the Youtube version: 