In 2012, a man named Peter Turchin predicted that by 2020 the US would reach “peak instability” marked by violent unrest and major social upheaval. Turchin is one of those “cycle guys.” That means he looks for patterns in history to help predict the future. He’s an ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and mathematician at the University […]
Remember Archie Bunker from the 1971 TV show All in the Family? In it’s stride, it was a number one show and drew viewers from over 21 million households. By the Hollywood standards of then and today, Bunker was a authoritarian, racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobic “Nazi.” He used nearly every religious and ethnic slur you […]
The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings reminds me a lot of another congressional hearing in the early 1990s. No, I’m not talking about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. I’m thinking of the testimony by the 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ in 1990, just prior to the United States first war in Iraq. To understand this […]
Every election cycle, voters hope that a savior or an organized group of righteous elites will come along and reinvigorate the economy, raise wages, restore communities, and reform broken institutions. When these bearers of hope fail to provide even a modest reprieve, the cycle begins anew. They hope that the next Clinton, the next Obama, […]
By now, most people reading this will have heard of the Alt-right. Are they really just racist trolls, or are they the right wing version of Occupy Wall Street: young, technologically savvy, and a bit counterculture? Perhaps they are both or neither depending on who you ask, but the Alt-right is defined less by their beliefs […]
It is wildly ineffective to try and convince people that Trump is dangerous if protesters carry Mexican flags while burning US flags, smash storefronts, and are photographed acting in an even mildly threatening demeanor. Effective protest have to work just like political campaigns. They have to be unoffensive, measured, and carry a ‘common-man’ sensibility. Based on […]
The biggest winner of the 2016 election is the anarchist. Despite what you think of Trump, there can be no doubt: globalism is dead. The anarchist’s centuries long battle against the centralization of power has finally turned in his favor. The power elite may never recover from this defeat. However crude his presidency may turn out to […]
John C. Lilly is one of my favorite “alternative” scientists. His popularity has waned significantly since his death in 2001, even as his contemporaries like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna have continued to have strong followings. Still, Lilly’s admittedly outrageous ideas and prophecies are worth remembering, not because they are necessarily true, but because, like all mythologies, they give us […]
Here is part 2 of my interview with Jasun Horsley of the Liminalist Podcast. Listen to part 1 here.
I sat down recently to do an interview with Jasun Horsley of the Liminalist Podcast. We talk about my new book, Bureaucratic Insanity for a short bit. Then we get into discussions about meaning, the banality of office life, the death of autonomy, the worship of symbols, and too many other eclectic topics to lists. Click here to […]
