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 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…
The passive tipping point that could break both stocks and housing “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the fantasist pretends the sea isn’t there; the realist adjusts the sails.” —Adapted from William Arthur Ward What happens when markets stop asking, “Is this a good…
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…
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…
“Outstanding, sophisticated, and mesmerizing…a spiritual intrigue similar to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.” —ForeWord Reviews