Has the world made progress on climate change since 2000? Nothing has changed on a scale that matters. Attitudes have certainly changed. Behavior, not so much—not corporate behavior and certainly not individual behavior. We’ve seen incremental change. What’s needed is transformational change.Read More
It’s January 15th, 2021. We have 10s of millions of people vaccinated, more each day. Daily cases of new COVID-19 infection also continue to rise, as do hospitalizations. Coronavirus sucks. We can all agree on that. Most of us, anyway. But where is anyone publishing data for those new COVID-19 cases cross-referenced with those new patient’s vaccine status? Like, was a new case vaccinated or not? If vaccinated, which brand of vaccine, how many doses, etcetera?
Democracy is going through stormy seas. The howling winds of the hurricane have been hallooing to anyone left on deck: Assange, Snowden, Weinstein, Epstein. All stand for whistleblowers, active and passive, all have become shorthands for the political scandals that shook liberal democratic political culture to the core. The sails of SS DemocracyRead More
The gov-corp model is endemic to American politics, with its most explicit expression by an American politician in Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay “The Study of Administration.” It’s also the cornerstone of the philosophy of neoliberalism, as propagated by wankers like Friedrich Hayek, von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Under the neoliberalRead More
Conspiracy in the modern world is a complete red herring. Not because today’s popular conspiracy theories are false; but because the culture around dripfed conspiracy theory is a planned distraction designed to mislead.Read More
We argue about rights and wrongs or problems and their solutions in terms of ideology and ideal, often to hide from the challenge of turning real imperfect answers into next-step decisions. But arguing in abstraction is a popular filibustering propaganda: sounds strident, does nothing. If you want to shift the needle, the practical pro-active answers are the only solutions that count.Read More
Headlines proclaiming the big success of this vaccine are ubiquitous. Write-ups virtually cut and paste across all corporate media. It’s the same angle repeated a thousand times: 90% effective – what a triumph, millions of doses ready before year’s end, billions of dollars next year… Something fishy is going on here. The results don’t match the reporting. At all.Read More
In COVID-19, the media industry finally found an alternative clickbait to Trump with a better click-through rate and a lower political cost. Many daily newspapers devote two-thirds of their headline articles to rehashed coronavirus fear-porn. Covering every angle? Not at all. That wouldn’t serve the mainstream media’s long-term purpose…Read More
“Nothing appears more surprising… than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.… force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the freest and most popular.”Read More
Joe Rogan Experience, the world’s biggest and most influential podcast, migrated to Spotify on Sept 1st 2020. Dozens of the show’s key episodes have been purged from the migration; and there’s a sly opacity about the apparent censorship – a familiar authoritarian strategy. The media bogeymen and policed language episodes excluded follow a clear theme. Is it Spotify abusing corporate privilege, preying on Rogan’s contract loopholes, or is Joe bending the knee and sacrificing his reputation for the big money payoff?Read More
Left v Right, Blue v Red, Biden or Trump? This false dichotomy has been the first and (so far) only test the ruling elites have needed. Its results let citizens self-select a life as one of the 300+ million suckers at the low-stakes plutocracy table…Read More
As the plutocracy’s assault on the nation’s social safety net intensifies, recent data shows that billionaires and corporations are refusing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in owed taxes every single year. Criminal evasion on such a scale should put all the hand-wringing about recent George Floyd “looting” into perspective.Read More
Can we restore normality – law and order – in the face of civil unrest that’s polarizing America? In other words, as Sam Harris asks in episode 207 of the Making Sense podcast: “Can we pull back from the brink?” to restore normality or is this the start of the culture wars?Read More