photo by Crannofonix News of anti-regime, pro-Pahlavi rally in Sweden last month, from wikipedia CC BY 4.0 Iran has been dealing with sanctions, embargoes and blockades from the US, Israel and the rest of White Empire for decades. Each new administration selects ways to further squeeze and punish America’s favourite whipping boy. The result is…
Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein (image released by the House oversight committee). Via Scheerpost. Each time I read new revelations from the heavily-censored Epstein files, I am at once shocked and not at all surprised. It’s a cliché that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The oft-resurrected causal debate that arises when someone says…
words on a T-shirt I saw recently; pretty much sums up what the pols and their media are trying to do to our minds, I think Things can change. So Cory Doctorow reassures us: [In] Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capital in the 21st Century, [he introduced] the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a…
ChatGPT knows me pretty well. I’ve asked it hundreds of questions by now, and told it my reactions. It’s saved me hundreds of hours of time, and given me information, quite quickly and precisely, that no search engine could ever have managed. The tool is trained with one purpose in mind: To make you want…
Last summer, I wrote what I think is one of my most important posts about our species’ nature and how it has led to our civilization’s accelerating collapse. My thesis was that what differentiates us from all other species on the planet, including h. neanderthanesis, is our profound distrust, fear, discomfort, and intolerance of creatures…
image by AI; not my prompt As a compulsive writer and an incurable overthinker, I have a great love of incongruity. Some of the most important insights I have had in my life came from recognizing and addressing incongruities — things that seemingly contradict or which don’t make sense in the context of something else…
If you were to show the verbatim text of any of Trump’s recent messages and declarations — from his speeches, memos to foreign leaders, and social media blatherings — to anyone who has no predetermined assessment of the man and his motivations, it would be absurdly obvious that the man is in the advanced, and…
For at least a century, a well-established principle has held sway in commerce: You can’t discriminate against customers in your pricing. Everybody pays the same price for your product. You can offer a volume or ‘last-minute’ discount, of course, but that discount has to be available to anyone who buys that volume of your product…
I’ve begrudgingly learned two hard-won lessons in humility so far in life: First, my youthful confidence in ‘fixing’ and ‘saving’ the world gave way to an understanding of how complex systems actually work: nature adapts through deep, redundant, interconnected processes that humans cannot control, copy, engineer, or outlast. Human attempts at efficiency, mastery, and rational…
This is #50 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. image by AI based on the ‘word portrait’ below; my own prompt Sometimes I try to draw a ‘portrait’ of my community, just as it…
