Aging is No Blessing: “Twentieth-century science doubled the life expectancy of Homo sapiens, but our health still declines at nearly the same age today as it did in 300 BC. We’ve learned to keep chronically ill adults alive, and made some welcome progress in maintaining health. But in 2024, we’re about as likely to develop the diseases of aging—like cancers—if we live to age 60 as we were in the Iron Age. We’ve never actually extended the human lifespan. The oldest person to have ever lived (to an alleged 122) was born in 1875 and never saw the 21st century. ”
Are Thoughts Sins? “Those who are suffering from OCD and other mental disorders have a unique experience of life that we struggle to understand. However, God does understand our suffering completely: ‘He knows our frame; he knows that we are but dust.’ To those suffering from thought-action fusion, our message is not, repent of your thoughts. It’s, your thoughts are not sins.”
Breaking Points: “Even if we accept that the superpower’s days are done, it still leaves us with the question of why? Surely, becoming less powerful on the world stage isn’t enough to unravel society on its own? It’s not, but going from being a superpower to just another country on the planet leads to a crisis in identity and purpose. A country that loses sight of what it is and what they’re here for will often end up fighting itself to discover that identity and purpose, just like a person. Societies are, in many ways, living organisms. They’re also organisms with many smaller organisms within, many of whom decide they cannot live with each other. That’s where widespread violence stems from.”
Cultural Engineers and Their Nightmares: “Mulholland Drive is a reminder that as long as we find art irresistible, we will be continually complicit in our own deception. Seeing nothing outside or prior to the dreaming body of the Great Mother, [David] Lynch embraces a logic of perpetual doubling down. More symbols, more worlds, more layers, more entities, more dreams, always giving rise to more interpretations. A cascade of self-devouring complexity, flickering back and forth with a stultifyingly-simple New Age worldview in which the word ‘consciousness’ is repeated ad nauseam. There is a striking complacency to this approach, which the dark forces he depicts likely find eminently useful.”
Our Gathering Storm: “Insurgencies almost never emerge in wealthy states, not because such states lack populations with internal grievances; rather, rich countries have high levels of ‘state capacity,’ the resources and reach to exercise full control over their territory. Poor countries with inaccessible terrain, such as mountainous regions, often struggle with insurgencies, because weak states are less able to stop insurgent groups from forming and metastasizing in rural areas. The American government is many things, but it is not weak, at least not in a hard power sense…It takes a special kind of lunatic to attempt to launch an insurgency under such conditions.”
Speed…and…Action: “Have you noticed yet that America has turned into a Coen Brothers movie? Everywhere you look, you see madcap characters disgracing themselves while doing their bit to burn the whole country down. It’s a panoramic extravaganza of everything gone wrong, with slapstick overtones, driving toward an apocalyptic climax — civil war, nuclear war, economic collapse, maybe all three. And all because the people on-screen just can’t stop lying.”