The real underlying currency of our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it. Everything always comes down to this one real currency. If you look at
"This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don't know if I can handle that right now," popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today.The post was just
There's a scene from John Steinbeck's The Pearl that's been coming back to me over and over again ever since I started writing about US politics. I find it amazing that this scene hasn't become a political meme yet, given Steinbeck's fame and given its
For some reason 9/11 keeps coming up in my online interactions with people lately, both with establishment loyalists who call me a "9/11 truther" and with skeptics who say I don't write enough about what really happened on that day 18 years ago. So I
The late psychonaut/philosopher Terence McKenna once said "The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation," and I think my regular readers will immediately and experientially understand exactly what he was talking about.It's not always easy to be on the outside
Everyone made fun of Billie Eilish the other day for not knowing about Van Halen. Meanwhile most of them still think they live in a free democracy where the news reporter tells you true facts about the world.Here's how politicians, media and government could eliminate
I watched the film Official Secrets the other day, which I highly recommend doing if you want to rekindle your rage about the unforgivable evil that was the Iraq invasion.Which is a good thing to do, in my opinion. Absolutely nothing was ever done to address
"I can't go on. I'll go on." ~ Samuel BeckettSometimes it just gets to be too goddamn much. You just finished a soul-draining argument with a family member who insists that Putin controls all major world events because that's what the TV said so it must
Every year or so around my birthday I like to pause and write an essay outlining where I stand and what I'm doing here as clearly as possible. I do this partly because I think it's important for crowd-funded media to be fully transparent about
At some point in your life you've experienced at least one moment of clarity. Maybe it was just a little bit of clarity, maybe you got reamed up the third eye by The Whole Enchilada, but to a greater or lesser extent you caught a