Wars. Waste. Wall Street. Welfare. “The economy doesn’t work for you — it works to extract from you.” —Michael Hudson Financialization is a word you have probably heard in economic news, but its true meaning is rarely explained. The popular media treats it as the natural growth of finance in…
How the Law of Reversal Is Remaking the Middle East “The Middle East is no more. Welcome to West Asia.” —Mohammed Soliman The post-Cold War regional order has entered a period of systemic collapse. That’s the verdict from Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and one…
Subversive Wisdom for an Age of Collapse “The great bulk of political history has been written from the standpoint of the state…The infrapolitics of the weak are the invisible, everyday forms of resistance.” —James C. Scott The past week’s headlines have been impossible to ignore. The narrative driving the global…
Resolving the All-Male Trinity “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” — Maria Prophetissa I grew up praying to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God. All male. I didn’t question it as a teen. But somewhere…
“The way up and the way down are one and the same.” — Heraclitus Most religions acknowledge humanity’s shortcomings and expect something in the future: a reset, a restoration, a judge, a new age, or an event or place that makes this life worthwhile. But only one central figure in…
“The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes If you have a 401(k), buy gas, or wonder why your grocery and utility bills keep rising, look no further than the invisible machine running our global economy. For most of the…
When the Revolutionary Becomes the Empire “It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group.”—Carl Jung The conflict between the United States and Iran is usually framed in terms of nuclear programs, sanctions, and regional power. That’s the visible layer. Beneath it…
“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”—Heraclitus I’ve spent years waking at 3AM with the same burning question: Why does everything turn into its opposite? I’ve come to call it the Law of Reversal. For this essay, I’m using the word flip. But here’s what…
Gold, yuan, and the end of dollar rule “He who owns the gold makes the rules.” — Anonymous A reader on Sunday’s post mentioned The Wizard of Oz. That single word—Oz—sent me back to an essay I wrote over two years ago called The Land of Ounces. I went back…
A Three-Part Mini-Series — Part Three “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 18:3 In Part I, we met the Builder—not a single person but an archetype, a pattern of thinking that has shaped Western…
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews