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
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
The original lyrics of Nina Simone’s SINNERMAN were a hymn of challenge, beckoning the foul sinner back to the fold. But Nina Simone answers the dimestore evangelism with a more powerful rebuttal: the tragic unjust plight of the Black Man in cruel America.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
Meditation and mindful practices – Vipassana, Jungian ‘ego death’, Buddhism nondualism, transcending the Maya, Mahayana Buddhism advaya, Dzogchen samadhi – wonderful aspirations, complex practices, a handbook for reaching ego-death liberation from the emotional animal idiot within. OR ARE THEY?Read More
America, more than anywhere else, is a perpetual winner-takes-all contest of wealth and power. Racism is a piece of this dynamic. Police brutality is the front-line; keeping winners winning and losers trapped in generations of exploitation.Read More
Universal Basic Income is going to happen. Sooner or later. The real question is whether it’ll be truly universal and without strings or whether it’s weaponized by authority into a control mechanism. If the latter is what happens, we can kiss democracy goodbye. Forever.Read More
Friend versus enemy, faithful versus corrupted, good versus evil: choose your favorite dichotomy, it doesn’t matter. Tribalism is compelling. It’s melodrama designed to misdirect public discourse away from scrutinizing the real business of exploitation. Governments, corporations, institutions, vested interests, city halls, these power dynamics use the same method. Democracy itself subordinates to this corrupt pantomime.Read More
How did a mere academic movement of the mid 20th-century metastasize – over less than three generations – into a neo-identitarian phenomenon powerful enough to be assimilating venerable institutions whole departments at a time? Public opinion (and therefore policy) is being subordinated to a consensus mediocrity, hostile to talent, individuality and merit. Is society helpless against this confederacy of dunces; or is there a deeper more sapient power dynamic embedded in postmodernism’s banality substrate?Read More