Order of Operations - Nested Parentheses - Matryoshka Bitches
Who is really on top, has never been quite so hard to figure out (nor so lied about)
First, a note for (and hearty cheers to) my many new readers – reading times are GREATLY overstated – lots of pictures and shit-tons of links, below. Main piece is only ever a fraction of the whole platter – please don’t be scared-off from sampling!
Hey Folks
I’m back up and chugging, digitally speaking – and still wading through the fourteen hundred essay backlog, that my brief down-time set me back (I may perhaps even be approaching a thing I long thought theoretically impossible – reading too much).
In any case, I’m glad I dug through the pile, instead of just skipping and starting again. Not just because tons of stuff is happening right now, and lies and murderous consequences are everywhere, but because there are a TON of really smart people out there who give a shit, and are trying to figure it out.
I know that if you’re already on substack to read this, you have almost certainly noticed that already – and are here precisely because it is such a pleasure to find keen minds that are active and working!
But I still don’t think we think hard or often enough about how exciting and useful it is, to have a TON of free-thinking going on, in the midst of vast storms of state evil and monopolist oligarch corruption.
Sure, we’re all completely screwed in all kinds of ways – but at least we haven’t given up – or we wouldn’t be trying so hard to consider and share new perspectives, so we could all do much better.
Since I have an especially rich crop of excerpts and links today, I’ll try to keep my own bit short(ish). Seems a good time for an idea I’ve been turning over in my head for decades, ever since I first got into history, then began to read deeply into the obscured realities underneath those sanitized and state-serving official versions we are taught.
I sometimes wonder if we might sum-up much of hidden (but real) history and the drive toward conspiracy theories both, with one very basic (and yet mind mindbogglingly widely reverberating) question.
Just who exactly is who’s bitch around here, anyhow?
I do apologize for the crudeness of the expression. But must also note that rather oddly, the ‘street’ language I invoked will present as most abrasive to the exact same clique of post modernists who consider everything in culture civilization and life itself best understood as a matter of power-dynamics (but also think it highest blasphemy to be clear or direct about anything, ever).
Me? I like clarity and shared understanding A LOT more than I like theory and inbred cliques (especially when they are obsessed with power to a positively unwholesome degree).
Anyhow, waking people up a bit is also an important part of education. Sharp questions, too.
To offer another sharp question that we are usually much too polite about – when we talk about Money at scale – state finances, balance of trade – we are sometimes allowed to ask where, how much and very vaguely who, but we never get a really satisfying long-term answer as to WHY (The F@CK).
In my last post I talked about Nixon scrapping Bretton Woods and screwing the whole world at once for US financial advantage (that is, to allow a bankrupt nation to keep dominating indefinitely) by using Saudi influence on the oil trade to restrict energy transactions to US dollars, making them necessary and valuable, just when Nixon had destroyed their old clear real value in gold equivalence.
So then, did that mean that the Saudi royal family (long used by imperial Britain, for their own power game purposes in the region) suddenly became the boss of a superpower? Certainly, their extraordinary level of wealth saved whole fleets of venerable British stately homes from ruin, and they also invested heavily in American real estate and markets when both were in trouble and helped drive them higher. No question, their capital and influence can now hurt their old “Great Game” masters and their new ‘allies’ – but does that mean they have now established a reverse kind of dominance?
You can actually accumulate a whole pile of clues about that one going in both directions, very strongly, (the 9/11 mother-lode, sadly still half-buried).
Even more achingly relevant and painful for anyone watching the last couple of years especially, is the question about Israel. Do they effectively set American foreign policy, through AIPAC, as people like Professor John Mearshiemer insist? Many citizens who are outraged about what has happened under both Biden and Trump believe this (and this one remains very catchy for people on both the left and right).
But while Mearshiemer is smart and insightful about many matters, and the realist view, while harsh, is much less crazy than dozens of others which enjoy favour with powerful factions, I find myself more persuaded by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson’s completely alternative view – that America uses Israel to do things that advance their own imperial interests in the region (one of very few, long thought a key to global dominance by great game theorists) without ever having to answer to their own people for it.
Sadomasochists might call this kind of play topping from the bottom. That is, pretending to submit to the “dominant” force, but actually directing every part of the action to meet your own needs.
Now of course I have to stop here, for an extra bit of clarity and distinction. What America are we talking about here, and What Israel, also? The idea that either of these is a single unitary thing is nuts – especially recently, since both are now closer to open civil conflict than either have been in generations.
American people are simply not as portrayed – not even by American people! Don’t mean to say they are dishonest, or under-sharing, these days (ye-gads), but only that we are so used to ingesting their competing editorial positions of tribal disdain, we don’t stop often enough to consider our friends.
As above – I’m not trying to pretend away vast problems, only stop for a moment to also note some very positive signs of humanity which are always obscured in BigNews narratives, because HOPE is the very last thing that they want any of us to have (let far alone share, in common).
For the record, I know smart and principled Americans who are well off, and very poor indeed, on the left and the right and a huge number who used to know, but aren’t now feeling represented by anyone. Some of my American friends enjoy criticizing other Americans, sometimes with good reason, sometimes mostly with bile and spite they could just as well direct into sports (far better, actually).
But absolutely NONE of them are setting imperial policy – and I use that phrase carefully, to denote the weird crazy things that always somehow happen, even though the voters never ask for them. Both parties conspiring against the populace in general, as if they really do consider that anti-citizen project their most important job – and representing the popular will a sort of a combination side-hustle / art project they do with their ‘creative’ advertising/propaganda friends, meant entirely to charm the idiots (us) at election time – so they can go back to never actually SOLVING THE FREAKIN’ PROBLEMS.
Again, to be super clear – I’m not asserting that our problems are simple, only that we’ve got so used to putting band-aids on missing limbs, that we don’t even think about not cutting off limbs anymore.
Guaranteed Annual Income (or UBI, the modern variation) sounds appealing when you are desperate, and I’ve never lived far enough away from that margin myself, to ignore the appeal – but it also means a fundamental surrender to central direction, and away from a chaotic rich culture of diverse regenerating freedoms.
Prosperity is now a dirty word – but I have never met anyone on welfare who wouldn’t rather have a job.
Considering human impact on the environment is very important – but it is long past time to re-examine the specific approaches which were devised decades ago by monopolists and investors, and have been used ever since to skim and game our collective environmental aspirations into vast markets of profits, with still very shaky results in terms of established reliable infrastructure.
Again, to be super clear – there was always another obvious way to do environmentalism – which was for millions of people to give up almost all of modern convenience, and prove they were still happy. That is – we were the exact people who were supposed to prove the case for moral restraint, having both the surplus to give up (relative wealth, compared to most places) and the information.
We failed the test, and since the richest people on earth, (with the most intense program of state guilt-indoctrination) still couldn’t manage that outcome in useful numbers, we have proved that whole line a fantasy, for the whole world (I actually think we’re the very last to see it, still dawning slowly here).
Are we so decadent, so detached from the key practical and social infrastructure now, that we assume it comes into being spontaneously? If so, we may keep surrendering more power to central control and bankers until we live in a tyranny that will force us to give up much, and decide the timing and degree of every last little sacrifice for all of us (and still absolutely NOT save the environment – war is WAY more profitable, once control is established, and they still show very clearly, they outright prefer it, every time).
My hope comes from knowing so many people from all around the world, who recognize one another instantly, almost as parts of a diffuse team, just because they are still thinking and trying to overcome the foul old entangling paradigms, so we can finally share enough understanding to DO good lasting things, plant crops on solid ground, instead of endlessly patching holes in a sinking boat with no rudder.
Resumes are irrelevant to this team, ‘left’ and ‘right’ long since left in the trash bin (where the traitors on both fake co-option sides, dragged and sullied them). The point is hope – but not stupid, though.
Finally, because I am fascinated by the work of Matt Ehrett (though persuaded more fully in some historical parts, than others), I must now pose the strangest who is really on top question of all. But first let’s stop and remember, Phillip K Dick was convinced the Holy Roman Empire was still in charge!
The question is – did the American Revolution actually succeed? (Or is it, like Zhou Enlai famously said about the French Revolution “Still too early to tell”). I hinted at this question before when talking about the historical use of tariff policy (almost always oversimplified into emotionalist binaries, by our ever stupefying BigNews breakdowns). That is, that America was far more successful at fostering it’s vigorous and lasting industrial independence from well established Europe, than it was at keeping European capital out (then as now, money is very hard stuff to resist, especially if you have big plans).
So the question is serious. Did America break away, only for England to buy back key sectors of control?
Again, I don’t mean my working class chums in England or America – we’re talking titanic creeps only. The ones who reliably show up to betray the long term interests of the working and middle class into the hands of rent seeking monopolists, unless citizens stop squabbling so hard and recognize corruption (not culture slapfights) is THE fundamental enemy. That is, the point past which all other democratic aspirations finally become possible, instead of sacrificed for war and dominance games.
I have to note here (remembering what is was like, before I crossed a threshold, again) that just as I would have waved-away studying economic complexities a few decades ago, preferring grand idealist ideas (and now think both, are crucial), a few years ago, I would still have laughingly dismissed the idea that the old empire still had the quality of deep bloodthirsty imperial arrogance and war spirit stoked and ready to catch the world itself ablaze, that it might rise to new glory from the ashes.
Of course I’ve already made that sound way more darkly poetic-heroic than I should, considering what a goddamned nebbish is now representing the empire. When I compare Starmer’s character to that of Corbyn, who was destroyed in detail by calculated smear coverage from his so-called allies on the left in BigMedia, I just want to scream. That was when I stopped trusting the Guardian – and in retrospect, we all should have seen that chill coming – it was far too useful for far too long. Now, entirely neutered and state-power serving, it is ‘useful’ in another, truly grotesque, way. (for making people idiots and then keeping them pickled in outright dangerous levels of righteous indignant ignorance).
Ahem (I never heard anyone go off on Emerson Lake and Palmer worse than a super fan, you know?) Lost love really sucks. Sure, the Beeb hurt me first (and CBC before that), but they are kind of supposed to do that to everyone, given an adequate arc of time!
One of the mental techniques that I find most useful and enjoyable, is to think about things as weighted doubts. Sure, some things are a completely solid true or false, but a whole lot of stuff is indeterminate, and yet potentially important.
If we leave the mental switches in our head set to “probably this” and never take the time to think about “yeah but what if all of those switches are wrong, because we judged from wrong information?” we accept a lot of silly stories and explanations which fall apart completely, when we put the ideas into a broader context. It isn’t just “What if that guy is lying?” or even “What if the guys who say he is lying, are lying too, for other, also weird and probably untrustworthy reasons?” You have to go all the way!
For me, it ends up feeling like a dance – different parameters rising or falling as new information comes in, and taking whole networks of related potential causes and effects up or down with them.
Sounds wonky, I know, but we’ve all done it at least once. Moved a strong maybe into a probably not. Or a no-way into WAY.
I’ll confess that at first I bought the pee-tape story completely. Beautifully crafted piece of propaganda, both slanderous and salacious in a way that hit home way too well. But my friends, that one has been moved from strong maybe to NO WAY with absolute clarity, for all but the most stubborn idiots.
Seriously guys – that is pure Blue-Q stuff – as dumb as PizzaGate – and just like PizzaGate we literally went there (right to the source) checked it out in detail, looked around, found out it was complete bullshit, concocted (in this case democratic party paid) fraud) and an incredibly racist and dangerous fraud also (another reason why it continues to appeal to so many righteous hypocrites, perhaps? A delicious vent for unwholesome urges they ascribe only ever and always to the despised OTHERS?).
You can hate either of them on their own or together – but peace is not an evil conspiracy from Putin’s puppet bitch. People who think that are embarrassing.
(It would actually be infinitely more accurate to say war is the product of evil conspiracy from Biden’s bitch – though we might also – like the New York Times is finally beginning to – ask whether Biden was getting a whole lot of his best warmongering clues from jolly old expert mass-murdering London).
Here's another very weird perhaps even rude idea, which I have not been able to dismiss, no matter how often I toss it around in my head. I would not ever want to be misunderstood as endorsing Aleksandr Dugin, but I think he has caught something important, when he suggests that the only way someone so hostile to the established deep-state could come to power in an America which is now effectively run by the almost entirely unelected and unexamined inter-agency complex, is by using allies in a sub-faction (deeper state?) of that deep state, against the dominant (and also clearly decadent) faction.
It would be grossly simplistic to characterize this as a clash of old established banking and political corruption (the real driver of war for centuries, with religion used as propaganda, instead of diplomacy) versus a new cabal of digital banking everything app people, who see Chinese competition in the digital realm as even more threatening long-term, than their extraordinary industrial prowess.
But – for just one last mind-f@ck today (and then I promise to go back to being less rude and more artful and charming again, next time)
What if the capital (in the money sense) of the old world, once saw that America was ultimately going to overwhelm all of their competing imperial dominance games at once, and got in at the ground floor, so they’d have a seat at the table and a cut of the power and loot from the new global dominance play?
And what if those old imperial money hordes which have been clearly shown funding (and stirring up) wars for profit for centuries, also thought the Chinese advancements in integration of social media and banking really were a clear and unignorable threat to their (entitlement to) dominance over the globe?
Would they:
A – Betray their very own bought-and-paid-for-vassals in governments all around the western world, and bring a radically disruptive team into power, which could create room for the digital mob to take the reins away from the flailing bankers (using algorithmic speed a full generation better than anything they’ve already sold the bankers, natch) in a desperate ploy to vault ahead, in the new realm (at any social cost).
Or
B – “Pull it” Elect a chaos agent to finally bring western hegemony, whether truly American, or European capital using America, or Saudis using Brits to use Yanks, or whatever (and whoever ultimately has whose hand up their hand-puppet ass), to an end forever – and let the whole world go back to figuring stuff out for themselves, without some creepy bastard screwing up their politics, every damn time they really do have a shared aspiration for better, just to make sure they still can’t get it.
And of course – start transferring all those venerable globe striding assets toward China at best possible speed, as the self evident new best way to get rich and stay not only powerful, but the MOST powerful. (definite issues – but that’s a whole different rant).
Anyhow – like I say, I’m talking about strong and weak maybes, here, and the reason I raise that idea as a framework, is that I have some really wild links today, which might individually seem to make one case or the other seem so strong, that we can dismiss all alternate explanations. But not so fast!
I know, I know – BigMedia has trained us to expect (demand?) easy lazy ANSWERS to complex questions (and pay no attention to the fact that those don’t exist, and don’t reflect reality, when we try).
So why do I share things that point in several contradictory directions at once (consistently, with glee?) Because I like to think for myself, I don’t like simplistic “for dummies” versions of anything. What I love most are rich and fascinating CLUES, which stimulate new thought and investigation. And I bet you do too!
Which is why I share this selection with you today. In terms of the reference library, one heck of a lot more like a grumpy political argument in the periodicals room (with the coffee machine and most homeless) than a mutual admiration festival of uniform faux-wit at an over-mannered Annex dinner party.
That is to say – actual fun and lively minds, instead of freakin’ groupthink torture!
Cheers to one and all. I find myself increasingly jealous of Anya K, who ends every program with a hopeful affirmation to her entire audience about them all being the hope of humanity and saving the future (wow!).
But I’m an atheist, so I have to rely on a smaller scale and more direct kind of love for my hope-fuel, instead.
Either way – love big or love small. Love something well enough to keep growing yourself better. Look for others who made and keep making that choice, and you’ve found yourself a team you can trust – left and rightness irrelevant.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hope isn’t a fantasy or a finally perfect ideology – that’s counterfeit shite every damn time, designed to lure us in, then make us suspect the whole idea of hope was always silly, all along.
No my friends – HOPE IS A PLAN.
(and any two people – or tribes – who work at understanding each other, can plan).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And now – drumroll please – the latest installment of “This Wonky World”
A festival of links – and fear not, I will end again with some inspiring ones (as I like to).
But first I’ll share a few fresh videos. I have noticed something over decades, which seems to happen in every kind of creative work – when you are on the right track, and listening respectfully (that is, still open) the universe will show up with all kinds of help and stoke your courage. Conversely, when you’re doing something dumb, vengeful, egotistic or overly wilful (waving-off the wu-wei way) – you get crickets.
So, I went to sleep last night feeling pleased about my new piece, but a bit nervous about how to reinforce the most challenging points I was trying to make – and woke up this morning to find that several of my favourite analysts and journalists had showed up to give me a very helpful boost.
Judge Napolitano is a great tonic for any on the left who still think there isn’t any principle on the right – you will not only be unable to further sustain your ignorant bigotry, you’ll recognize that you have many more allies in principle (assuming you still have it yourself) than you ever before expected.
This whole interview is worth watching, but I cued it up to one short clip which is a MUST WATCH truth-drop from a Chinese citizen, talking to American citizens. Both the Judge and Mearshiemer spent years as professors also, and you can really feel their admiration for his courage and clarity.
Alexander and Alex (the Duran) greeted me this morning, with points I’ve been going after recently, about Europe (and please NOT Canada) descending into the worst kind of mass murderous madness! A world war to reset their bankrupt books by violence!
(Though of course, all said in even better detail and with even more wide witness)
Nima and Alex Krainer really rounded out my fortunate-timing viewing rather perfectly – on the most brain-straining questions of who is on top (and are they really?) and which empire is this, anyway?
And now to the excerpts and links – wow, so many people were on a roll, while my computer was down!
Will Schryver is one of my favourite military analysts (and remember, I’ve been studying this stuff for years, myself). Clear as can be and scornful of all the heaps of bullshit that such malign capital always uses to rationalize its psychopathy writ large.
“...Anyway, the point is that America needs to go to war again in an attempt to erase the stain of having lost to the Russians, just as going to war against the Russians was meant to erase the stain of having lost to the Afghanis, just as going to war against Iraq and Afghanistan was meant to erase the stain of having lost to the Vietnamese. And … well, you know the drill by now.“
I kind of want to share all of Kitt Klarenburg’s latest stuff (courageous and strong as can be). Anyone interested in the harsh reality of power politics and hidden murderers should subscribe to him – truly superb. Here’s one which is both topical as can be, and also links back to some of the history I was just questioning.
“...The UNC’s establishment was eagerly supported by notorious Ukrainian fascist and Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera, founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), two ultranationalist factions heavily complicit in the Holocaust. As the mainstream media has acknowledged, his legacy endures in modern Ukraine, in the form of Neo-Nazi military units such as Azov Regiment, and he remains a venerated figure in certain quarters of the country – much to the chagrin of Kiev’s Eastern European neighbours.
Bandera believed Nazi Germany’s UNC recognition would encourage American and British backing for OUN-B’s anti-Communist crusade, and Ukrainian independence. The Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR), which the OUN-B was instrumental in founding in 1944, was already in covert contact with London and Washington. As it was, no such formal support ever came to pass. Yet, little-known declassified CIA records expose the malign contours of a long-running conspiracy between Bandera and MI6 to destabilize the Soviet Union during the Cold War’s initial years.
This dark handshake only expired because MI6’s fascist asset was resistant to joining forces with other Ukrainian anti-Communist forces, therefore jeopardising plans by Washington and London for all-out war with Moscow in Donbass. That plot, intended to ultimately collapse the entire USSR, has eerie, direct echoes of the current Ukraine proxy war. So too Britain’s willingness, then and now, to go far further than the US in building alliances with the most reactionary, dangerous Ukrainian ultranationalist elements, in service of balkanising Russia.”
“…On March 29th, the New York Times published a landmark investigation exposing how the US was “woven” into Ukraine’s battle with Russia “far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” with Washington almost invariably serving as “the backbone of Ukrainian military operations.” The outlet went so far as to acknowledge the conflict was a “proxy war” - an irrefutable reality hitherto aggressively denied in the mainstream - dubbing it a “rematch” of “Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Syria three decades later.”
That the US has since February 2022 supplied Ukraine with extraordinary amounts of weaponry, and been fundamental to the planning of many of Kiev’s military operations large and small, is hardly breaking news. Indeed, elements of this relationship have previously been widely reported, with White House apparatchiks occasionally admitting to Washington’s role. Granular detail on this assistance provided by the New York Times probe is nonetheless unprecedented. For example, a dedicated intelligence fusion centre was secretly created at a vast US military base in Germany.
Dubbed “Task Force Dragon”, it united officials from every major US intelligence agency, and “coalition intelligence officers”, to produce extensive daily targeting information on Russian “battlefield positions, movements and intentions”, to “pinpoint” and “determine the ripest, highest-value targets” for Ukraine to strike using Western-provided weapons. The fusion centre quickly became “the entire back office of the war.” A nameless European intelligence chief was purportedly “taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his NATO counterparts had become” in the conflict’s “kill chain”:
and
“…Yet, the investigation’s most striking passages highlight London’s principal role in influencing and managing Ukrainian - and by extension US - actions and strategy in the conflict. Both direct references and unambiguous insinuations littered throughout point ineluctably to the conclusion that the “proxy war” is of British concoction and design. If rapprochement between Moscow and Washington succeeds, it would represent the most spectacular failure to date of Britain’s concerted post-World War II conspiracy to exploit American military might and wealth for its own purposes.”
But you should also check these out -
And stalwart Aaron Mate has the counterargument (though actually entirely complimentary)
Here’s dropsite talking about another brain-straining idea I mentioned above – deep state civil war
“...Senior officials at the Pentagon and State Department want to pivot away from the military and empower civilian leadership and democratic rule in Pakistan, and Richard Grenell, who now serves as Trump’s envoy for special missions, has been outspoken in his calls to free Khan and restore democracy to Pakistan. But the CIA, which has worked closely with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), based in Rawalpindi, for decades, sees the military and security establishment as a more reliable partner than the country’s civilian authorities.
“This is an interagency battle regarding who gets what responsibility under the upcoming new national security policy that is slated to come into effect around late April and early May,” said one source close to the discussions. “The CIA is trying to make sure that there is no major shift in policy on Pakistan.”
Simplicius the Thinker has several fine new pieces out also – but I just loved the compactness of this tweet especially (empire-vision is WEIRD)
“...In short, the US and Trump want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to be strong enough to dominate China, while also swiftly sewing up the ‘pesky little’ Russian invasion, and keeping the various subsequent geopolitical exigencies from precipitating on the European continent. Who wouldn’t want that? The power to dominate the entire globe, and dictate its affairs. But Trump and his administration are living in another time and place, walking across fiery coals in boots whose rubber soles have long worn out.
Here’s gutsy Caitlin Johnstone – with a Frank Zappa quote which could not be more perfect for the moment
(and much to say herself, as well)
And
“…You see this in the way our friend believes that I “helped get Trump elected” by criticizing the people who were perpetrating an active genocide. He just automatically took it as a given that it was my responsibility to stay silent on Gaza because the person in charge was a Democrat and his veep was running for president. The fact that it was a genocide which needed to be ferociously opposed never entered into the equation for him. All he cared about was winning.
All of the most shocking and gruesome things I have ever seen online were recorded in Gaza during the Biden administration. Nobody who’d paid the slightest bit of attention to Israel’s US-backed atrocities in 2023 and 2024 would believe this was anything new that just started under Trump. But because Gaza is just seen as a political plaything by these freaks, they only care about it now that Trump is in office — and only insofar as it can be used to take points away from the Republicans.
And that’s exactly why they lost. The Democrats calculated that the Harris campaign could simply ignore Gaza without putting any daylight between Kamala’s policies and Genocide Joe’s and still win the election, and they were wrong. Polls show that among people who voted for Biden in 2020 but not for Harris in 2024, Gaza was by far their biggest reason for not doing so. The Democrats believed in nothing and stood for nothing, and nothing is what they got.
Mainstream “centrism” is just as toxic, murderous and tyrannical as Trumpism. These people will watch entire populations being mowed down by the hundreds of thousands via the policies of the people they voted for, and as long as it doesn’t interrupt brunch they’ll keep sipping their mimosas and laughing and tweeting and feeling smugly correct, and then go to bed and sleep like babies in an ocean of human blood.”
I stand corrected – and grateful (not for Chuck Darwin’s sake – but for clarity and understanding’s). I have made this defence of Darwin myself, even recently – but the quote about Malthus destroys it (strong possible shifted conclusively to definite NOT)
“...The X Club’s support of Darwinism was less a scientific decision in this respect and more of a political one. As Darwin later admitted in his autobiography, his own theory arose directly from his study of Malthus:
“In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here then, I had at last got a theory by which to work”.
By universalizing Malthus onto all living creation, the X Club obscured the qualitative difference between humans and monkeys which was advantageous for an empire that can only control humans when they adopt the law of the jungle as standards of moral practice and identity formation rather than anything actually moral.
Although Darwin’s modern defenders proclaim that the biologist was innocent of any accusations of promoting the social Darwinism which X Club associate Herbert Spencer innovated, the fact of Darwin’s own words showcases that he was not only aware but supportive of the social application of his survival of the fittest ideology onto human systems. In his 1871 Descent of Man, Darwin noted:
“The weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”
Now here are a few very smart things that most of my friends on the left will not have seen (but should)
I love Mark Wauck – even when I disagree with his conclusions, he is scrupulously honest about his sources and his own perspective, so like any good journal, you can filter yourself, and always learn much of value, thanks to his tireless digging and very fine-discerning eye for key detail.
He is one of many on the right who object to Trump’s violations of principle, but still see much of what he is doing as necessary and long overdue (a case that the left used to make, continuously, for decades).
As such, he can see things about how political dynamics are operating, that emotionalists are blind to. This insight is especially strong (and resisting the lesson, especially debilitating for the political “left”).
“...Trump’s trick has always been to get the libs to defend ridiculous things and look silly. The goal is to destroy their sense of political identity. The libs are now moving to defend Wall Street. Within a year they will have no principles left and be catatonic.”
Here is a very smart take about what a screwed-up economic problem this really is.
“…Has Trump heard of “Triffin’s Dilemma”?
His two fundamental notions about trade and dollar’s primacy are in direct conflict with one another!
That is, the US dollar CANNOT be the global reserve currency, if the US does NOT have trade deficits. In other words, if the US dollar must be the preferred currency for global trade and FOREX, then the US must run massive trade deficits with the rest of the world. How else are the other countries going to acquire US dollar?
Interestingly, Trump also acknowledged that the US will be a third-world country without the extraordinary privilege of the dollar.
There is no simple solution to the Triffin’s Dilemma. In a multipolar world, the US dollar will slowly lose its hegemony and the US empire will disintegrate.
De-dollarization is inevitable.”
Matt Taibbi is another truly fantastic voice who has been involuntarily politicized – once the feature writer for Rolling Stone and a darling of the left (and scourge of Wall St) for many years, he is now reviled (by idiot follower-hordes) simply for defending free speech and journalistic principles against Biden’s grotesque violations of both.
“…Everything you need to know about modern Democrats, particularly so-called progressives, is encapsulated in the fact that instead of turning to the witness with a lifetime of First Amendment advocacy, Jayapal opened the floor to Nina Jankowicz, a former Homeland Security official who came within a hair of becoming America’s first “Disinformation Governance” chief.
“Ms. Jankowicz, to clarify for my Republican colleagues,” Jayapal began (independents don’t exist in Congress, even when we sit in witness chairs), “is it true that the Constitution guarantees lawful permanent residents the right to free speech?”
While Jankowicz answered in the affirmative, my first thought was about a 2006 case filed against the Departments of Homeland Security and State over the so-called “ideological exclusion provision” of the PATRIOT Act, which was endorsed by both parties and used to bar immigrants for speech reasons long before Trump. It was a provision politicians had a chance to change for years, and didn’t.
Then I thought of the ACLU’s February 2016 efforts to investigate a new DHS “Countering Violent Extremism” program, and how coordination with that “CVE task force” shortly after became a responsibility of Barack Obama’s new “Global Engagement Center,” when he signed its executive order in March 2016. That was the whole point of this hearing, to ask if GEC and DHS took that authority to investigate ISIL and al-Qaeda and abused it by turning it inward, to target “peaceful protest” of Americans. But why would a progressive Democrat ask me about that, when a high-profile former DHS official was available?
“Is it true,” Jayapal said, “that engaging in peaceful protests is protected by the First Amendment?”
“That’s right, Congresswoman.”
I felt like screaming: Why can’t we have both? Why can’t we protect the right to protest and get rid of this horrendous digital censorship apparatus? What is it about Democrats and this issue? The party once had civil libertarians in its ranks. Where did they go?”
Here he is with some very timely information for Canadians. Electing Mark Carney would be a lot like making Conrad Black King of Canada (bad idea twice over)
“...A PE firm — Brookfield Asset Management — and Canadian pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et Placement du Quebec bought Clarios in 2019 for $13 billion. About $4 billion of that was funded by PE investors. The new owners had success reducing debt — it dropped by $2.1 billion between 2020 and 2024, according to Fitch Ratings.
But Clarios added debt when it came time to sell in 2025. The company took on about $4.5 billion in loans from a syndicate of lenders led by J.P. Morgan to pay a special dividend to its PE investors.
Bloomberg News broke the story:
Car battery maker Clarios International Inc. raised debt to pay a $4.5 billion dividend to its buyout-fund backers, one of the largest such payouts on record. That paid for a distribution to investors, including Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. and Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, letting them take the equivalent of 1.5 times their equity out of the deal, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the deal is private.
Brookfield and its investors ensured a profit by loading the company with more debt. The investors get the money, while the company still has to pay the debt. For Brookfield and Caisse, there is nothing but upside. Investors, to borrow from the Logan Roy character, have already made their nut. Plus, there’s more money to be made if interest rates go down and the demand for their EV batteries remains strong, which could make conditions ideal for an IPO.”
And a very well deserved take on the OTHER unsaid thing about education funding
“…Between the Davos-style architecture projects and annual gloating headlines about the endowment gains schools like JHU and Harvard tend to with the care of British gardeners, any complaints from universities about the loss of even large amounts of federal dollars is hard to take. It’s easy to feel sorry for affected workers and researchers, but these are ultra-wealthy institutions who despite being run by (in many cases) utter morons have been gifted a profitability model more riskless than too-big-to-fail banking or NFL ownership. It’s almost impossible for Ivy League schools to lose money, which makes one wonder about professors who say they’re being “picked apart and destroyed” because their school is losing $400 million of taxpayer funds while sitting on $20 billion in assets (or in the case of Harvard, losing $686 million when it’s sitting on a $53 billion). Do they know what that sounds like?
Still, paying taxes to subsidize high tuition, gaudy construction and an explosion of non-academic labor might be tolerable, if universities were educating the young and conducting good research. Schools have instead become public-private hodge-podges existing in what Austin Powers would call a “consequence-free environment,” responsive neither to the market (which would demand superior teaching or affordability) nor voter preference (same). They compete on status, handing out degrees in self-obsession and intersectional horseshit that are useful for upper-class networking and not much else. Like military contractors their one important customer is the state, for whom they often perform services that are not just useless but outright antisocial. In the last years, taxpayers have sent hundreds of millions to support censorship, gain-of-function research, and a galaxy of idiotic DEI programs that mainly serve as job programs for skill-deficient upper-class neurotics. The DiAngelo-style racial weirdness is far less of an issue than the sheer uselessness of these armies of DEI officials who came to dominate campuses in recent decades, in a manner eerily like the political officers at the Soviet school I attended in 1989.”
More dempocrites in action! (as faithful corporate stooges, natch). Got to love Lee Fang.
“...The industry has also influenced the debate by funding groups that might otherwise support restrictions. Save the Children, which previously endorsed taxes on sweetened beverages to fight childhood obesity, abandoned this position while pursuing significant grants from major soda producers, including a $5 million contribution from the PepsiCo Foundation.”
Ex CIA analyst Larry Johnson has many sources and useful things to say (amazingly aware of the perspective of other countries, for an American commentator). But he also knows a real gem, when he hears it – and wow, a weighted doubt for sure – but if this is so, OMG would it ever explain a whole lot of other stuff, eh?
“...In other words, the US Government received more money for a bond today than it did yesterday, and the US Government obligation to pay interest has shrunk. I had lunch with a good friend today, who has access to Trump financial officials, and he said this is the real purpose of the tariffs — i.e., restructure the US balance sheet, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of short-term debt owed by the US Government.
I was told that if the average US citizen understood how fragile the US financial system is, especially from the burden of short-term debt, that this could cause a panic, followed by an economic crash. Trump is behaving like a magician — i.e., asking people to focus on potential trade benefits and increased jobs, while doing financial legerdemain.”
And here he’s more in his wheelhouse, talking about how intelligence gets distorted.
“...Remember Vietnam? CIA analysts were pressured to alter intelligence on Viet Cong (VC) casualties during the Vietnam War due to political and strategic considerations. George Allen and his lead analyst, Sam Adams, insisted that the strength of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army was far greater than the briefs that General Westmoreland and his intel staff sent back to Washington. The Pentagon was invested in the narrative that US military operations had been so successful that the Viet Cong was on the verge of collapse.
I should note, in passing, that George Allen was my instructor in the New Analyst course, which I attended in the summer of 1986. He spoke openly and passionately about the pressures brought to bear on him and Sam. George admitted that he gave in to the pressure. He was not a wealthy man and had two kids in high school who were headed to college. He could not afford to put his financial future at risk by opposing CIA Director Mccone.
Sam Adams was another story. Sam came from a wealthy family and had, what is known in colloquial terms, fuck you money. The bosses couldn’t threaten him with losing his source of income, so he stuck to his guns.
Let me describe what happened:”
Do you care about or follow German politics? If so, this one might just make you cry.
“…This past week was one for the history books. The German parliament amended the constitutional debt brake so as to enable unlimited military spending, irrespectively of how deeply into the red it will push the federal government’s budget. Meanwhile, none of that fiscal generosity is to be extended to investment in hospitals, education, firefighters, kindergartens, pensions, green technologies etc. In brief, when it comes to funding life, austerity remains part of Germany’s constitutional order. Only investments in death have been released from austerity’s constitutional clutches.
The underlying reason for introducing this stunning change to Germany’s constitution is simple: German automakers are now too uncompetitive. They can’t profitably sell their cars to civilians in Germany or abroad. So, they demand that the German state buys tanks that Rheinmetall will be making on Volkswagen’s disused production lines. To get the state to pay for this, the constitutional brake of government deficits had to be bypassed. Always eager to serve their Big Business masters, parties of permanent centrist governments were deployed to usher in this cynical constitutional change, one that annuls Germany’s post-war commitment to peace and disarmament.”
Do you care about working class people in England? See above.
“Trickle-down economics” is at heart simply a statement of the idea that massive inequality of wealth is necessary to wealth creation. There is no evidence for it.
The truth is, of course, that the poor ultimately benefit only from the economic activity of the poor. But not nearly as much as the rich benefit from the economic activity of the poor.
Taking money off the poor does not lead to an increase in wealth creation. If you look at the billions the Labour government is seeking to remove from the disabled, that is not only money taken away from them, it is money taken out of the wider economy.
It seems astonishing that the Labour Party has forgotten the entire message of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. But then, the Labour Party expelled Ken Loach for opposing the genocide of Palestinians.
Those on benefits have a much higher propensity to spend than the more wealthy elements of society as they have no choice; they need to spend all their income to survive and enjoy a minimal acceptable standard of living. This income is spent on the local goods and services they need, again to a much higher degree than that of wealthier people.
Much of this spend benefits the landlord class, but it is almost all within the UK economy and it has a multiplier effect in economic activity. All of this is pretty obvious. By simply taking this money out of the economy (and it has no real relationship to taxes and revenue) the government is reducing the overall size of the economy.
This austerity is the opposite of pro-growth. It is absolutely anti-growth. It achieves the precise opposite of the alleged goal of Labour’s economic policy.
This is OFF THE CHARTS IMPORTANT in terms of who is really pulling strings here?
Especially for my fellow history keener friends who remember that Sullivan and Cromwell (read the full piece) was the old firm of the incomparably evil Dulles brothers who wreacked havoc on the world from CIA and the State Dept in the early post war world (still large and in charge, and oh f@ck that ain’t good for any of us).
“...For a long time, I’ve discussed a secret center of power in America, what is known as “Big Law,” a network of law firms who serve as a shadow government for the out-of-power party.
Lawyers have always had a special place in America. They must maintain a dual loyalty, serving clients with advice and court representation, but serving the public as officers of the court. There’s a dense ethical code lawyers must maintain. For instance, they can’t help their clients break the law, and they can’t switch sides in a dispute.
In 1931, Robert Jackson, who later served on the Supreme Court, gave a speech to the American Bar Association making that point. “We believe in an independent bar, free not only from government control, but intellectually independent of client control,” he said. “In the client-and-attorney relation the client is not a master, the lawyer is not a mere hired hand. He is an officer of the Court, with a duty of independent judgment in the performance of his professional service and under a duty to serve all sorts and conditions of men.”
But Jackson, along with men he admired such as Louis Brandeis, did not feel that lawyers, especially those in New York working for financial firms, lived up to their billing, instead seeking to twist the law on behalf of the powerful. And the problem is much worse in modern America, dominated as it is by oligarchs. This is especially true in cloistered specialities, like antitrust.
A few years ago, I spoke at the American Bar Association Antitrust Section, and observed the rage the gathered corporate lawyers felt towards anti-monopolists for barging into their club. While I noted at the time the legal elements of the disagreement, there’s a political element as well. These lawyers are the Democratic establishment, the real thinkers and operatives behind the frontmen like Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer and candidates like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. And it’s been this way for decades, such that it’s systematized. Young ambitious liberals have to get their few years at one of these firms and then they can be considered a real lawyer.”
And
“...In this context, Paul Weiss’ immediate capitulation caused a lot of lawyers to despair. One way of seeing this dynamic is to ask the question: If this venerable law firm, which has the resources to fight and a legacy to protect, capitulates, then who else will? But the way I see this dynamic is that it merely reveals to everyone in Democratic politics what we’ve already known, which is that big law is a place of toxic anti-democratic sentiment. And the entire edifice of party politics, that fancy lawyers do the real governing work while shabby hacks handle the rabble during the elections, is a charade to hand over America to private equity and monopoly.”
Here is the unique and must-read Stoller again, with more perspective on tariffs.
“…Even the Biden administration, which did seek to re-shore certain industries, couldn’t control its economists. In 2024, the Biden’s White House Council of Economic Advisors published a blog post explaining that those worrying about physical production were silly, and that U.S. services trade surplus showed how our strategy was working. We specialize in things like finance, services, and “intellectual property, such as patents, trademarks, software and data licenses,” that we design here and collect rents on from abroad. On the other side of the aisle, the pull against production is just as strong. Republican Congressional members, deferential on virtually everything, are beginning to muse on taking tariff power away from Trump.
Wall Street-types are deeply hostile; billionaire Ray Dalio recently said the U.S. can’t make things and should stop trying. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal was puzzled at the very notion of preventing foreign goods from undercutting domestic production.”
And
“…For 35 years after World War II, the constituency groups who built the New Deal arrangement had a broad understanding that financial consolidation led to fascism; the hot money flows of the 1920s, in the hands of private bankers, had helped raise the stock market, but also bring Hitler to power and break the world. The things required to make a democratic society, such as well-paid workers, communities, domestic production and investment, a robust educational system, a hearty small business apparatus, lots of small banks and farms, et al, are just not consistent with high stock prices and the consolidation of economic power they imply. Power, they knew, corrupts.
Economists have retroactively given this policy framework a name, “financial repression,” meaning that those who had financial capital were heavily taxed and controlled. While the government prints dollars, there is another group that sought to manage bonds, stocks, and credit instruments, without public checks: Wall Street. And that group, enfeebled during the Great Depression but waiting in the wings, bided their time.”
Once more (with gusto - but really, the guy has a super useful angle and good data).
“…It’s a shocking audacious plan, an attempt to address a big and obvious problem, which is America’s inability to make vital goods we need. As I noted on Sunday, the system we’re in - neoliberalism - is designed around having living standards oriented around raising the value of financial assets through bubbles and design/finance instead of building physical things and selling them for profit. Imports and offshoring were a huge piece of neoliberalism, providing the cheap flat screen TVs that justified losing entire communities.
But is Trump breaking from that system, or is he just smashing whatever he can in the name of populism, and thus justifying a revenge tour from Wall Street? It’s not just the stock market that frowned, virtually no one fully embraced his plan. The White House press release of supporters is suspiciously thin, and includes mostly administration officials and Republican members of Congress, who kind of have to support it. Conservatives in general are not on board; one right-wing group is taking Trump to court and trying to have his China levies thrown out.”
Ken Klippenstien usually covers intel but here he finds curious sentiments at large protests
“...As I arrived at the State Capitol in Madison today, I was immediately struck by the sheer number of people gathered — the largest assembly I’d seen since moving back to Wisconsin last year.
Thousands amassed, and the crowd was eclectic, from Vietnam era veterans to UW students and professors. One guy was even dressed up as Luigi Mangione, hoodie and all.
This was nothing like the sea of blue blazers and politicians protesting in front of USAID and other government shrines in Washington, D.C. several weeks ago. And though everyone was there to protest you know who, I was genuinely curious to hear people’s thoughts, so I put on my journalism hat and went around posing a simple question: ‘What brings you here?’
People are pissed at management writ large, with those who run the country. Not just Trump or Elon, not just Republicans or Democrats, not just the appistocracy or corporate America, but all of them.
“This is like an everything, catchall protest,” as one attendee told me, chuckling at the absurdity of the idea that this was just about Trump.
Given the magnitude of the protests today, from large cities to State Capitols to small towns, the message is clear. People have nowhere to look but in the mirror to find someone who they think will save America.
And back on his beat, he also finds still more outrageous bullshit in the halls of power (where brains and principle together might just work, but have yet to be tried, it seems)
“... You have made the United States safer; you have made our forces in Europe and Africa stronger,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said. “On behalf of this committee, thank you for your distinguished service to our nation.”
One after another, Democratic, Republican and even independent senators agreed on Langley’s greatness and how masterfully he had conducted his job bringing peace and stability to the continent. The performance on Capitol Hill was all the more shocking because in his testimony before the committee, Langley told his overseers that he had completely failed.
“Back in 2007, when we were stood up,” Langley said of his command’s founding, “we looked at the challenges across the globe and especially the challenge of terrorism. … At that time, the global presence of terrorism on the African continent was 2 percent … today it's 43 percent.”
But I can’t leave you there, with the delusional imperialist view only – in fact, you should subscribe right away to Nkrumah’s Africa – because the future-thinking Pan African vision which was thwarted so long ago (at such a horrifying cost in blood) lives on, and remains (like Africa itself) the great hope of the world.
Here’s a truly funny one. Ian McGilchrist (a darling of intellectuals on the left for decades) outright likes the work of Mark Bisone, who has been right-coded for various cultural blasphemies (clarity) and the great sage was even foolish enough to say so, out loud – which got him in all kinds of hot water – unacceptable inputs!
Which reminds us once more that people who say they respect great thinkers, actually only respect their personal fantasy about what they think the great thinker actually thinks – not the living person or the active mind (at all, ever). Great piece, too!
“...Now imagine the planet Earth as a brain, and the Cold War as a cognitive argument between its hemispheres. At the beginning of this conflict, the left-hemisphere (the Emissary) is the Soviet Union, with its material-reductive reasoning, godless utilitarianism, and centralized control. The right-hemisphere (the Master) is a rough alliance of several nations from the old romantic West. The peoples of these nations are still somewhat intent to carry forth the torches of individual liberty, restrained government, and respect for religious or mythopoetic understandings of reality.
However, at this moment in history, these right-hemisphere nations are long in the tooth. They are filled with internal contradictions and moral rot. If there’s a common mindspace above them, then it has started to lose its memories and coherence. And so, while they claim to have “won” the argument with the Emissary near the turn of the century, it was in reality a long surrender punctuated by crimes great and small, committed both in public and behind closed doors.
Why do I keep saying - read commentary about world politics from India? Because they see important things about the world that we could see also, but won’t.
“In the past two decades, the external debt of developing countries has quadrupled to USD 11.4 trillion (2023). It is important to understand that this money owed to foreign creditors is equivalent to 99% of the export earnings of the developing countries. This means that almost every dollar earned by the export of goods and services is a dollar owed to a foreign bank or bond holder. Countries of the Global South, therefore, are merely selling their goods and services to pay off debts incurred for development projects, collapsed commodity prices, public deficits, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inflation due to the Ukraine war. Half the world’s population (3.3 billion) lives in countries that allocate more of their budget to pay off the interest on debt than to pay for either education or health services. On the African continent, of the fifty-four countries, thirty-four spend more on debt servicing than on public healthcare. Debt looms over the Global South like a vulture, ready to pick at the carcass of our societies.”
I shared a piece by Alex Krainer recently, in which he talked about different forms of government and how well they worked for citizens, and along the way made several observations which we in the west consider outright blasphemy, even though they’re kind of obvious, if we think in terms of our own lives and experience.
I am really enjoying the sharp and well argued work of Tara van Dijk (morbidsymptom.substack), using very strong clear economic and social analysis, which no one can deny comes from the progressive intellectual tradition, to tear idiocies and excesses on the left to absolute shreds! (and she does it with flair, too)
“...What if the greatest trick women ever pulled was convincing men that patriarchy was what they wanted?
That binding themselves to women—providing, protecting, laboring, marrying, fathering—was some kind of male domination fantasy, rather than a system that, structurally, served female reproductive interests.”
NOW - VEERING TOWARD THE SCHOLARLY, THEN OUTRIGHT UPLIFT
Something fascinating (as many of his pieces are) from Greg Ashman – educator friends, subscribe!
“...I have been writing about social loafing for many years. It was one of the first teaching-relevant phenomena that I looked into with a research lens. It is also an area of research that stretches back a long way. As Karau and Williams (1993) explain:
“The first experiment to suggest a possible decrement in individual motivation as a result of working in a group was conducted over a hundred years ago by Ringelmann (cited in Kravitz & Martin, 1986). Male volunteers were asked to pull on a rope, tug-of-war fashion, as hard as they could in groups of varying sizes. The rope was connected to a strain gauge that measured the group’s total effort. The results showed that as group size increased, group performance was increasingly lower than would be expected from the simple addition of individual performances.”
However, this effect has since been replicated with many varied tasks, including those that are cognitive in nature rather than physical. A classic cognitive example includes the brainstorming experiments of Diehl and Stroebe (1987). When asked to generate ideas individually or in groups, the total number of ideas generated tended to be greater when people worked individually.
Here’s a piece from Jonathon Haidt’s After Babel, about the failure of ‘digital learning’
“…West borrows the organization of a tragic play to structure the book across three main ‘acts’. It’s a clever choice, and helps carry the book’s central argument which, much nuance aside, boils down to this: The recourse to screen-reliant education during the pandemic was largely a disaster and had numerous adverse effects on children, however unintended.
Tragedies generally begin with outsize ambition, and in ‘Act 1’ West recounts the breathless, if not hubristic, expectations people (the usual Silicon Valley set but also a wider array of pundits who should have known better) touted for technology-first education prior to the pandemic and in the early phases of school closures. Readers come to understand why so many school systems turned to ed-tech, with remarkable uniformity and remarkably little debate, as the pandemic took hold.
In ‘Act 2’ he juxtaposes these soaring expectations with what actually occurred on the ground – in homes, countries and entire regions of the globe – when ed-tech was deployed as a (typically) singular solution to the educational challenges imposed by the pandemic. This part of the book contains the central action — the drama, so to speak.
The recourse to screen-reliant education during the pandemic was largely a disaster and had numerous adverse effects on children, however unintended.
Tragedies end with new, if very costly, recognition and revelation. Things go astray, people get hurt, and overblown plans fall apart. But a tragedy is only a tragedy if the protagonists as well as the audience see this wreckage with moral clarity before the curtain comes down. People need to walk out of the theater wiser. This is certainly true with ‘An Ed-Tech Tragedy?’; readers come to understand what went wrong and why.”
Freya India is a really superb writer about the weird realities facing young people today. This piece only goes part way to landing (to me) but the sincerity is undeniable, and even just bothering to be this articulate about it, is a helpful effort. Also, I think she’s right about acknowledging the gulf and the pain it causes, being important for coming together again. As strong (and unlikely) a stand to take as simple principle would be, if any large faction (or party) on earth were ever to try such a thing!
“...When I go to religious and conservative conferences, I find little effort to reach girls and young women or attract anyone on the outside. Speaker after speaker recites ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy Ph.D., caring only about impressing an audience who are already convinced. Often it feels like an attempt to close religion off from outsiders, to seal it off, not to open up hearts. I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give words to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.”
Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander) has training in medicine and psychology, and unusual insights into things like big data and AI. But now and then, even a truly spectacular egghead can exceed themselves in a wonderfully artistic, philosophical, inspiring and history filled outing. Tour de force stuff! Delicious!
“…In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary:
Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news.
Why the colors of her coat?
The medievals took their dyes very seriously. This was before modern chemistry, so you had to try hard if you wanted good colors. Try hard they did; they famously used literal gold, hammered into ultrathin sheets, to make golden highlights.
Blue was another tough one. You could do mediocre, half-faded blues with azurite. But if you wanted perfect blue, the color of the heavens on a clear evening, you needed ultramarine.
Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? Climb 7,000 feet through the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to mine a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world.
Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. "The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from."
After years of writing, I think I can say the friendly casual inspirational voice is among the most difficult to pull-off (you can go wrong in so many directions/dimensions)
Ted Gioia is not only a master of that voice (an instant friend in print) but also one of those rare writers who reveals a great heart, but as an aside, almost in passing. (side effect of the genuine, instead of special effects in place of the real thing).
“…Maybe I should be pessimistic. But I’m not.
A huge shift is happening. Even in just the last 12-18 months, the cultural tone has started to change. This backlash against the Dirty Harry ethos started on the fringes, but has now gone mainstream with extraordinary speed.
People don’t trust the technocracy. They don’t want to be ruled by AI. They don’t want their doctor or boss or coworker replaced by a bot—or their job, or their spouse. They don’t even want to deal with bots in customer service or low-level situations.
They’re fed up.
You can even hear it on the phone—when people shout back at the machine: Please, just let me talk to a human being!
We’re saying that more and more often nowadays.
At a certain point, people won’t take any more. We are close to that tipping point right now.
I’ve predicted elsewhere that this rebellion will resemble, in many ways, the Romanticist movement that pushed back on the cold rationalist overreaching of the Industrial Revolution at the dawn of the 19th century.
It’s worth noting that the Romanticists didn’t get rid of the factories. But they restrained the dehumanizing excesses—gradually pushing back against child labor, slavery, unsafe conditions, excessive hours, and other abuses.
The eventual result was a taming of business by humanism. The change was so enormous that factory work is now seen as a good job in most countries.
We now need to restrain tech the same way our ancestors reformed the factories. And that means putting the breaks on our tech leaders—who are the immediate source of our Clint Eastwood problems.”
And here he is being playful with another couple of ideas that you never would have linked yourself (but will never be able to untangle again).
“…If Shakespeare were alive today, he would create video games. You can see the ‘player’ mentality in his plays—where role-playing and playacting are everywhere.
Consider the case of Hamlet. The title character wanders from scene to scene in a dark castle, encountering ghosts, villains, etc. But nothing gets resolved as he tries to level up—although eleven people are killed along the way. The play starts again the next night, with similar results.”
Here is something beautiful (and up-to-date) from a genuine evangelist for the sheer joys and pleasures of reading! (please, can we have thousands of those?)
“…In an essay titled “One culture and the new sensibility”, Susan Sontag argued that modern civilization has undergone a crisis of over-stimulation that paradoxically makes it harder for us feel anything but outrage and revulsion. Amidst the distractions and sensory overload implied by the modern, we become numb, uneasy with ourselves and what we’ve become. This is what she called “a massive sensory anesthesia”, or the process by which one becomes so overwhelmed that one can feel nothing at all. Against this, Sontag argues that Art can be a way of making us feel again, by means of reawakening our senses.”
Finally, Bogdan Luca is one of the finest art teachers for whom I ever sat as a model – not just effective encouraging and enabling, but also a genuine bearer of the deep spirit of art (something money can’t buy, which always blesses the entire world around it, just for the very nature of the energy). His column is lovely because it not only makes you think about art in a direct way – it makes you want to make some art yourself!
You want his latest in your inbox, trust me! (unless you have been feeling way way too inspired, lately, and need a break from all of that? - and if so, please say how!)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For anyone who, like me, rode along over the last couple of years with Scott Ritter as he stood almost alone for peace (at great personal cost), then became over-emotional and also over-optimistic in some very strange ways, and most recently shifted to being frighteningly bitter – Brian Berletic may just be the perfect balancer, you've been looking for.
To be clear, Ritter has showed extraordinary (heroic) courage for decades, and personally contributed a great deal to America’s potential to re-balance policy toward integrity (remote as that goal remains). No slight whatsoever to a genuinely great man.
But sometimes analysis requires a bit more sang-froid than he has been able to muster, of late.
Not to mention – Thailand seems like a FANTASTIC place to watch this mess from – at least when it comes to achieving some measure of emotional detachment. Long piece, but tons of subtle clarity.
Plus, Berletic himself is BRILLIANT and his perspectives not only thoughtful, but well-evidenced!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwYRkJqDbRE
The problem with Israel controlling the world is that a bunch of 'racists' get to act legit. Same way a bunch of wannabe macho men got to support Russia, not because NATO is wrong (even though that's a valid argument).
It's an uncomfortable situation wherewith some people use the truth of 'my' geopolitics as their excuse for hatred e.g., they'll 'conservatively' endanger gay folk.
I'm more you in that the USA is using Israel. However, with long relationships there's cross-pollination, and thus some Zionists are buying American favour. Similarly, cheap labour changed the whiteness of the UK, and eventually led to London's current mayor and their last quick prime minister.
When I'm reading the long version of you, it means I have to skip another 10 substackers repeating the news with outrage. Today, I can say, "Rather this!"
I'll take the ever-changing Pain of Salvation over 'Emerson Lake and Palmer'.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC-Ntvx_Uuc
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QKmOJl4GXQ