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…
The Rise of “Professor Jiang” and the Art of Attentional Capture “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison, The Doors (1969) We want to believe media simply informs. It doesn’t. Government and media share a special relationship and the same goal: steering – guiding behavior, shaping choices,…
“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…
Functional Insanity and the Brain’s Fatal Loop “Individual insanity is rare, but mass madness is the historical norm.” — Nietzsche Watch the news. Scroll your feed for thirty seconds. Listen to how people talk to each other. Open Substack and you’ll notice the same pattern everywhere: ordinary people are being…
Untold History of the U.S.–Israel Relationship “We are the nation of the chosen people. And we must always remember that we are the ones who have been chosen to lead the world.” — Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative thinker, 1980 The United States and Israel call their alliance a “special relationship”…
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…
How counterfeit empathy became social control “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” — Albert Einstein Wokeism looks like empathy. But it’s missing the one thing that makes…
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…
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews