Out of the Corner by Jennifer GreyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Review: Myths And Symbols
Myths And Symbols by Joseph M.; Charles H. Long KitagawaMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but (at least in the minds of the religious) actually participate in them.
We know from the studies of such historians of religions as Wilhelm Schmidt, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and Mircea Eliade that one of the central problems in recent study of history of religions is the problem of the High God. It was Mircea Eliade who observed that the problem of the High God among primitives became a central issue for historians of religions in the same generation that Nietzsche proclaimed the "death of God." And, Eliade continues in his observation, one of the most important elements in the structure of the High God symbol is the tendency of the High God, who is always the creator-deity, to become a deus otiosus after the world has been created. He describes this tendency explicitly in his Patterns in Comparative Religion.
What is clear is that the supreme sky god everywhere gives place to other religious forms. The morphology of this substitution may vary; but its meaning in each case is partly the same: it is the movement away from the transcendence and passivity of sky beings towards more dynamic, active, and easily accessible forms. One might say that we are observing a "progressive descent of the sacred into the concrete"; man's life and his immediate surroundings come more and more to have the value of sacred things.... Every substitution marks a victory for the dynamic, dramatic forms so rich in mythological meaning over the Supreme Being of the sky who is exalted, but passive and re-mote the supreme divinities of the sky are constantly pushed to the periphery of religious life where they are almost ignored; other sacred forces, nearer to man, fill the leading role.
And then there is this final statement which I should like to use from Eliade's work:
this slipping of the omnipotence, transcendence, and impassiveness into the dynamism, intensity, and drama of the new atmospheric fertilizing vegetation figures, is not without significance. It makes clear that one of the main factors in the lowering of people's conception of God. is the more all-embracing importance of vital values and of "Life" in the outlook of economic man.
Eliade's description of the history and structure of the High God being who created may be summarized as follows: (1) he is a the world; (2) his symbolism is related to the sky and thus he always represents transcendence, power, and wisdom; (3) after the creation of the world, the High God becomes deus otiosus, removed from the world he has created; (4) in his place are substituted the dramatic deities of fertility and creativity; (5) the High God is not completely forgotten, but he is no longer a part of the life of man and the world; he has no cult and worship is not addressed to him; (6) he is called upon or remembered in moments of strife or catastrophe when the basic structure of the world is threatened and when no help can be gained from the deities of fertility and creativity.
This pattern of elements and experiences in the structure of the High God bears a similarity to the structure of experience of the marvelously new. Subsequently there is the experience of awe and trembling fear before the wonder of the world, and finally, for Pascal there is the movement to silence. Now, I said there is a similarity, not a one-to-one relationship between the two structures, but the similarity is so marked that it might give us some insight into the religious experience of modern man; it might show us how, within the context of modernity, some basic patterns of man's religiousness may be discerned.
Pascal, unlike the enthusiasts of the Enlightenment, possesses that insight of double vision. He is able to see the infinite world of possibility which the new science makes possible, but he discerns at the same time that God has departed from this world and he is terrified by the infinite spaces, the void.
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Review: The Decline of Pleasure
The Decline of Pleasure by Walter KerrMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
May I make a small, possibly prejudiced, exception of chess? Chess moves quietly and gently a few squares away from the insistent abstraction of cards. Its pieces are not only dimensional but often different from one another: one can feel a knight in his hand, and know it for a knight, as he cannot the ten of clubs. The enemy is downed not by a count but by a physical presence that whisks him, physically, from the board. The contest is spatial and deeply satisfying; it is fought visibly on a terrain. One does not tally in his head alone the possible threats to his victory; he looks at them on the board, using first his eyesight and then his imagination. Luckier still, the game is complex enough to require quite a long time to play, long enough in some instances to encourage forgetfulness of demands lying in wait on a desk. Chess is also quiet, encouraging silence around it. A degree of surrender is implicit in its ivory bones. One cannot but be sympathetic to Gerald Abrahams' claim, in The Chess Mind, that "whereas in many intellectual processes the mind is assisted by conceptual methods-i.e. by abstract ideas-in the mental activity which is Chess such assistance is at a minimum... In Chess the mind comes as near as possible to pure vision, to that spontaneous act of intuition which apprehends and controls processes and relationships without being forced to do so."
Kitsch
https://share.google/aimode/Kujl5VZjp...
One of these is the prevalence of kitsch. We have all heard, and often lent our voices to, the cry that has gone up in the second half of the twentieth century lamenting the omnipresence of the second-rate. And we know what we mean by kitsch: brightly-colored magazines that are all eye-catching pictures and easy-to-read captions; digests of digests; films as synthetic as the celluloid they are printed on; television that has been described as "chewing-gum for the eye"; music that fakes a sentiment buried with Franz Lehár or fakes a folk-song beat in the guise of creating something contemporary, indigenous, and appealing to teen-agers. We sometimes conceive that we live in the land of the blob: blobs of color, hoots of sound, zoom lenses, what the comedians call "grabbers." Surfaces leap at us like babies begging to be picked up; when they are picked up, they have no weight and no conversation, only a smile....
The Voices of Silence https://share.google/WEy0Tajd9ytvTd14D
Adam and Eve lost for themselves and all who preceeded them the great gifts which God had blessed them with. One of these was the throne over the animals. How can we judge their sense of communication with other animals. Most certainly they were able to conferse with these lower creatures. Then we must be aware of a degree of inttelligens to which these animals were capable of inhabiting. This is necessary before we can continue in this saga. Refering again to the Bible we aknolege that God banished Adam from the Garden of paradise. Now here we admit the only flaw in our tale. I am unable to explain the manner in which Adam managed to secure such inteligent but monstorus creatures. There were five of them and their names were such: Zeta, Balt, Nappricondos who was the strongest, Lestar who was the craftiest and Bareen, leader and oldest. Some prefer to associate them by initials though I will continue to use there full names. To return to Adam we find he has lost his great knowledge and also his great memory...."
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Review: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel FoucaultMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Panopticon plague quarantine
https://share.google/aimode/8a8I6XiJP...
...all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the 'leper' and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. ...
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Saturday, June 27, 2026
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Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Review: The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic
The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic by Melanie McGrathMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This prompted me to watch Nanook of the North (1922) which I had neither seen before nor knew of the global fame and impact it had when released. What happened was that director Robert J. Flaherty had an affair with actress Maggie Nujarluktuk (also known as
Not only was this native population disrupted with forced locations, but their society was eroded by the introduction of alcohol which came out in later public hearings.
Inuit women began to appear at the Arctic Circle bar to reclaim their men, and soon enough, they also began to drink. The airmen quickly discovered these women could be bought for booze, cash or promises and the women were often too drunk to say no, or did not know how to say no to white men. When the first group of women had been used up, there were plenty more, and younger, down in the camp. And so it went on. A great many half-breed babies were born during that time, a good number of them with the tiny, shrivelled bodies indicative of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Fights broke out between jealous men and their wives, between husbands and between older and younger women. Inuit stumbled out of their huts into freezing nights high on rage and booze and too drunk to be able to feel frostbite setting in. There were a lot of amputations in those years.
By the mid-sixties almost every Inuit family in Resolute Bay had been affected by alcoholism. Things got so bad at the Inuit settlement that in some homes there was nothing to eat for days except the chewing gum the airmen handed out to the children to keep them quiet while they had sex with their mothers. A whole generation of Inuit children were left to bring up themselves while their fathers and mothers descended into squalor and depression. In the absence of any help, the children dealt with all this in the only way they knew how. Some learned to dissemble and lie, others sunk into states of apathy and denial. In the nine years from 1953 to 1962, fifty Inuit girls and boys were born in Resolute Bay. Thirty years later, nearly a third of them were already dead. Remembering it all brought Martha to tears. It gave her no comfort at all to know that, when it came to raw despair during those years, Resolute Bay had probably had the edge on Grise Fiord.
The testimony continued, and when the Commission broke for lunch, many of those who had heard the morning's witness simply sat in their seats, no longer able to trust their legs to carry them anywhere...
In the mid-1950s, lured by false promises of a better life, Inuit families were displaced by the Canadian government and left to their own devices in the Far North. In this icy desert realm, Martha Flaherty (granddaughter to Robert) and her family lived through one of Canadian history's most somber and little-known episodes. She later became a prominent figure in publicizing these wrongs. That is not covered in this book, but there is a documentary Martha of the North (2009) .
The breakdown of norms extended to the extreme case of Qimmingajak. Cannibalism featured in that family's descent into depravity during a period of extreme starvation and isolation in a traditional snow house (qarnaq). Qimmingajak consumed his campmates and ultimately his own son.
This book needed an Inuktut glossary, IMHO. Carefully, each native word was defined when first used, but that often was not enough help for me when reading further on.
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Review: The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic
The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic by Melanie McGrathMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Henry Larsen gave instructions for the ship's helicopter to go on ahead to scout out a possible route through the pack to Alexandra Fiord, forty miles to the north. He was particularly keen to position Inuit at Alexandra or at least on the Bache Peninsula which had long been of considerable strategic importance to Canada. From the tip of the peninsula to the northwest coast of Greenland was a journey of only thirty miles. For most of the year the channel between the two countries was frozen and it acted as an ice bridge for Greenlandic Inuit wanting to hunt polar bear and musk ox on northern Ellesmere in the region of Hazen Lake. The weather conditions at Bache were so severe that a formal border post would never be established there, but Larsen felt that the presence of Canadian Inuit in the area would at least discourage the Greenlanders. Their presence would also serve as an effective rebuttal if ever Denmark, Greenland or the United States made a claim for Ellesmere.
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Thursday, June 18, 2026
Review: United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy
United States of Oligarchy: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy by Casey MichelMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This richly detailed and thoroughly researched investigation paints a picture of the MAGA-era American oligarchs as Lex Luthor-like mega-villains. Consider the Trump dreams of Greenland and the oligarchs' fever dream of Praxis, a proposed city to which they can repair for global dominion.
This mess of power-mad techno-bros was enabled when Justice Anthony Kennedy authored the landmark 5-4 majority opinion in the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision, which ruled that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations, labor unions, and other associations. In his opinion, Justice Kennedy argued that political speech is indispensable to a democracy and that the First Amendment does not allow Congress to limit this speech based on the speaker's corporate identity.
• Money as Speech: The court determined that political spending is a form of protected speech, meaning restrictions on independent expenditures equate to limiting free expression.
• Defining Corruption: Kennedy’s opinion narrowed the definition of corruption, stating that only quid pro quo corruption (direct exchanges of money for political favors) justified limiting political participation. Independent spending, he argued, does not inherently lead to corruption.
• The Marketplace of Ideas: Kennedy famously stated that "there is no such thing as too much speech". He maintained that the government cannot level the electoral playing field by silencing certain voices, but should instead let citizens evaluate messages in the marketplace of ideas. [1, 4]
To balance the ruling's allowance of unlimited independent spending, Kennedy relied heavily on the promise of transparency. He argued that instant, real-time disclosure of election spending over the internet would allow shareholders and voters to hold organizations accountable.
However, this assumption has been widely debated. The proliferation of "dark money"—where funds are channeled through non-profit organizations that are not legally required to disclose their donors—has largely obstructed the accountability and transparency that Justice Kennedy anticipated. Critics, and even some proponents of the ruling, argue that the expected transparency failed to materialize in the way he envisioned. Some of the analysis of the Kennedy opinion in this book:
...in perhaps the most myopic line written in the entire history of the Supreme Court, “The appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.” It was all a jumble of contradiction, a confused mess of sloppy logic and sloppier history. As analyst Matt Ford wrote, Kennedy’s reasoning was “a stark and somewhat blasphemous vision for the American republic.” Rather than an electorate of informed citizenry and republican virtue, Kennedy claimed that the constitutional framers had outlined a nation of pure transactionalism— one in which money would buy political favor, and vice versa.
So from the Kennedy-delivered Super PACs money gave birth to power which corrupted and engendered the monsters of corruption: the oligarchs. And where are we now with the skewed wealth? Frontmatter statistics:
Years in which the bottom 90 percent of America owned more than the top 1 percent: 1946– 2005
First year the four hundred richest Americans paid a lower tax rate than the bottom 50 percent of Americans: 2018
We are treated here to the evolution of the idea of and warning against oligarchism from classical Greece to American history:
Surveying the ruling class in Athens, Aristotle decided that the literal definition of oligarchy was too pat. To the philosopher, oligarchy was something more, beyond mere numbers and power. It was better understood as a system in which “men of property have the government in their hands.”
...
As Aristotle saw it, you could also define oligarchy by what it wasn’t. To Aristotle, the antithesis of oligarchy was clear: democracy. As the philosopher continued, “Democracy [is] the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” And yet, even then, Aristotle wasn’t finished. 40 The philosopher concluded that it wasn’t simply the number of rulers, or the acreage of property ownership, that defines an oligarchy. Rather, it was wealth— the amount of wealth associated with the oligarchs
...
The Founders “feared a . . . source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy,” scholar George Thomas noted. 60 One early American official, Gouverneur Morris, worried that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” As Morris described, oligarchic wealth “tends to corrupt the mind and to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression.”
...
Sumner railed against the “slave oligarchy” trying to make the entirety of North America— and potentially far more— safe for slavery. “All who seek purity in the National Government must unite in this purpose,” Sumner thundered, “for only by the overthrow of this corrupt oligarchy, which, beginning in the denial of all human rights, necessarily shows itself in barbarism and corruption of all kinds, can a better order of things prevail.” For Sumner, the rise of an “Oligarchical Combination of slave masters, unknown to the Constitution, never anticipated by its founders, and existing in defiance of their example, has entered into and possessed the National Government, like an Evil Spirit.”
Hawaii is explored in depth as a case of the full range and impact of an American oligarchy
Lili‘uokalani’s oligarchic opponents whined that her proposals “reduced white influence”— a reality they would do everything, and use as many tools as possible, to oppose. But it wasn’t just opposition. As Dole’s lone biographer described, the oligarch and his coconspirators “began a campaign of attack upon every part of the [Hawaiian] government.”
...
Pushing through yet another constitution in 1894, these oligarchs restricted voting even further, limiting it to only the wealthiest, most propertied— and, needless to say, white— residents, with well over 90 percent of the islands now unable to have any say in the country’s politics. In the oligarchs’ minds, “The Hawaiians . . . and any other non-Teutonic members must be prevented from voting.” It was the equivalent of the mainland’s Jim Crow regime, set in the middle of the Pacific. 118 But it wasn’t just the voting restrictions. Any residual evidence of Hawaiian nationality— language, culture, identity— would have to be eliminated. As Helena Allen, who authored the only biography of Dole, wrote, “The Republic— an oligarchy— saw the last remnants of Hawaiian culture being changed.
...
With the final ascent of the oligarchy, Hawaii had effectively collapsed into a white supremacist police state. Any dissent, any opposition, any criticism would not be brooked.
I have a tendency to thank of Teddy Roosevelt as a macho racist proto-MAGA type. Here his more circumspect and progressive side is explored.
...he called for Americans to do everything they could to thwart a “civilization of a mere plutocracy.” It was a world that Roosevelt recognized intimately, given his upbringing. The “plutocrats”— the term Roosevelt used to describe the oligarchs— had already created a nation of “selfishness so appalling” that it could, if unchecked, usher in a “destruction hitherto unequaled.” It was language that seemed lifted from the socialists burgeoning throughout the era, but came from the mouth of a president attached to greater wealth than perhaps any before.
Some of the international reach and motivation of profiled oligarchs, like Zuck
...telling his staff that “everyone need[ ed] to tackle this intensively right away, if Facebook’s going to get into China anytime soon.” To that end, Zuckerberg laid out a three-year plan to have Facebook “fully operational” in China, from opening a sales office to partnering with a “senior Chinese leader” in order to build out a formal “partnership” with the Chinese government.
...and wannabe statesman Kushner
...even as a key player in the Trump administration, Kushner still had that albatross slung around his neck: that skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue, dragging Kushner’s corporate wealth like an anchor, down into the deepest red. There had been one moment, right before the election, when Kushner thought he’d found a lifeline. Joining his father, Kushner sought out a half-billion-dollar investment in the building from a leading figure in another Middle Eastern nation: Qatar. Connecting with Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the former head of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund (and a man also known by his own initials, HBJ), the Kushners thought they’d initially found success, with HBJ pledging $ 500 million on the condition that the Kushners could raise the rest of the needed financing elsewhere. Negotiations bled into 2017, well into the new Trump era— an era in which Jared Kushner was suddenly America’s chief diplomat, in practice if not in name. However, after revelations about a number of other potential investors in the building sparked public criticism, the Qataris pulled out— leaving the Kushners once more on the hook for spiraling debt payments. And then, the blockade began. In early June 2017, the Saudis, Emiratis, and a number of other regional regimes severed both diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar. Invasion hung in the air, with Saudi and Emirati troops massing across Qatar’s border. A tinderbox looked set to explode. Even more shocking than the blockade, however, was Washington’s response. Rather than act as the neutral arbiter many expected, the Trump administration immediately threw its weight behind the Saudi and Emirati moves— a stance led by none other than Kushner, who, according to CNN journalist Vicky Ward, “greenlit” the entire operation in the first place. “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody,” one Tillerson aide said. The conclusion was inescapable: “That person must have been Jared.”
...
MBS knew, Kushner was a man who, if the political winds in America blew in a slightly different direction, could help take the Gulf tyrant to ever-greater heights. The Saudi panel screening investments advised against partnering with Affinity and Kushner. But MBS immediately overruled them. Kushner and Affinity would get Saudi funding— $ 2 billion to start, and potentially much more down the road. And MBS would once more have a partner in the US who he could steer in whichever direction he wanted.
...
Kushner’s influence has not only continued during Trump’s second term, but is arguably more impactful than ever. As Reuters reported in early 2025, Kushner “remains involved behind the scenes,” including by “advising on Trump’s Middle Eastern strategy, helping select appointees and guiding certain cabinet members through the transition.” 824 Specifically, Kushner is “very, very close” to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, speaking to her “regularly.” 825 All told, according to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, Kushner has a “hidden hand” in Trump’s second administration— one you can see shadows and hints of, but one that hasn’t seen nearly enough attention, or nearly enough investigation. 826 Perhaps most pertinent, Kushner has been a direct adviser to the man who replaced him as the head of the Middle Eastern portfolio
Then, these network globally:
No one had forced figures like Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Pichai to build out their own links with tyrants around the world, gutting their pretenses about supporting liberal democracy...
The author also directly explored the bizarre Putinist-Far Right connection:
I’d arrived in Moldova to report on the annual conference of the World Congress of Families (WCF). The WCF was itself the foremost fundamentalist group anywhere in the world: a transnational organization dedicated to rolling back as many of the basic elements of liberal society— abortion access, same-sex marriage, even individual rights writ large— that it could find. It was, then as now, the leading bridge between hard-right American Evangelicals and fundamentalist counterparts in Russia, receiving funding from oligarchs on both sides
...
“Putin is an imperialist,” he said, wiping his mouth. “But what’s worse: Imperialism, which will kill your body, or the gender ideologies that the [West] pushes, which will kill your soul?”
...
He is also one of Russia’s most notorious oligarchs, a billionaire henchman for Putin, dedicated to obliterating democracy wherever and however he can, whether in Russia or elsewhere. Malofeev was one of the key figures behind Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, overseeing much of the post-invasion investment in occupied Ukraine— including, memorably, a theme park dedicated to Russian history.
...
The date was January 6, 2021. And the speaker was a man who would later be outed not only as one of the WCF’s recent keynote speakers, but as the author of Trump’s entire strategy to overturn the 2020 election and overthrow American democracy entirely: John Eastman.
...
as Russian journalists later discovered, the starting gun for the Kremlin’s invasion preparation rang out the day Ukraine went after Medvedchuk. “Three sources in the Russian president’s entourage confirmed that it was this story of the destruction of Medvedchuk’s [television channels] and the fact that [Ukraine] began to ‘harass’ him that became the last straw in Putin’s decision to prepare for a military operation,” Russia’s Verstka Media reported. As one of Putin’s acquaintances said, “[ Putin] took it as a personal attack,” viewing it as a Ukrainian escalation against him and his oligarchic proxies.
...
Most spectacular, American Ethane’s ownership group at one point even included Roman Abramovich, perhaps the most successful (and certainly most notorious) Russian oligarch of the bunch— a man who’d not only purchased the Chelsea Football Club, but who slid his illicit wealth into offshore vehicles around the world, slithering into the highest ranks of Western policy and cultural circles in the process.
...
The fact that a supposedly American firm like American Ethane was secretly controlled by a series of Russian oligarchs would have been problematic enough. Yet as with other American corporations, American Ethane had additionally tossed a raft of donations to US politicians far and wide: to the most powerful Republicans in states like Louisiana, to a fund overseen by House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, and even to the reelection campaign of Mike Johnson, who would soon become the Speaker of the House. The donations themselves weren’t titanic, coming in at only five figures, but they effectively illustrated how American corporations could turn into a sieve for foreign funds to drown American politics.
Of course, Musk, too.
Musk didn’t stop there, and quickly slid into outright genocidal apologia. “China’s repression of the Uyghurs,” Musk claimed, “had two sides.” Musk didn’t bother to describe what those “sides” were, or if, for instance, there were also “two sides” to previous genocides like the Holocaust. China may be committing horrific crimes, yes— but, as Musk saw it, perhaps the Uyghurs deserved it? Who were we to judge?
...
in early 2022, Musk immediately swooped in to aid Kyiv’s efforts against Russian troops. Both Musk and Ukrainian officials realized that Starlink— the Musk-led company arranging satellite coverage in far-flung reaches of the world— was perfectly placed to help Ukrainian troops converse across the battlefield. Musk even directly oversaw Starlink’s Ukrainian strategy, convening with company engineers for days on end, outlining ways the company could help circumvent Russian jamming. Soon, thousands of Starlink terminals flooded into Ukraine, with Musk transforming into the most impactful nongovernmental official of the early phases of the war. As one Ukrainian commander said, “Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war.”
...
rolling back Russian troops and proving the futility of such colonial expansion was clearly necessary. Ukraine was on the frontline of the fight for not only tangible topics like territory, but things far airier and far more important like freedom, democracy, and anti-imperialism writ large. For Musk, though, there was something more important yet: Armageddon. At least, that’s what later reporting revealed, trying to parse Musk’s thoughts during late 2022, when his views on the war— and on the rightness of Ukraine’s fight— flipped on their heads. In Musk’s mind, Ukraine’s successful parries against Russia were less signs of strategic success, and more risks that could lead directly to nuclear annihilation. As Ukraine’s pushback continued throughout 2022, Musk went into “crisis-drama mode,” with the oligarch suddenly starting to worry that Ukrainian success— and Starlink’s key role therein— could “lead to a nuclear war.” 698 Musk’s concerns didn’t arise in a vacuum. With his troops smothered and scattered, Putin had also begun rattling a nuclear saber, claiming that further Ukrainian advances would result in Moscow unleashing nuclear warfare on Kyiv...
...
Musk had spent much of the 2020s growing more and more reliant on Tesla’s success in China, both as a source of his personal wealth and his professional standing. To swipe an overused analogy, it was a bit of domino theory in effect: Musk’s political standing relied predominantly on his personal wealth, which relied predominantly on the health of the Tesla shares populating Musk’s portfolio, which relied predominantly on scaling up sales and production in China— all of which relied entirely on remaining in the good graces of Beijing itself. It’s not as if any of this was a secret, necessarily. As a Wall Street Journal headline blared after Trump’s election, China specifically saw Musk as a “conduit” to Trump.
Scholarly debate on the impact of such elitism:
One of the first to tackle the question head-on was Robert Andersen, a sociology professor</a> at the University of Toronto. Surveying dozens of countries, Andersen tried to answer one question: Did economic inequality really have a detrimental effect on democracy?
...democracy— Andersen discovered that “income inequality matters much more.” Overall wealth was still important, but the economic disparity within a country was far more pertinent to that nation’s support for democracy. Democracy, as he wrote, has “less support in countries with high income inequality.” The more unequal a nation, the less the support for democracy, full stop
Other scholars have confirmed as much in the years since. In 2024, South Korean scholar Sang Kyung Lee determined that “where inequality is more severe, citizens in liberal democracies are more attracted to authoritarian leaders.”And those authoritarians consolidate power:
In 2022, The Washington Post reported that Ellison, who’d long bankrolled Republican politicians and causes, was directly involved with something else: conversations about how Donald Trump and his allies could overturn the 2020 election. It’s unclear what Ellison said regarding Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021. But as The Post reported, Ellison’s participation was “the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options.”Adding it all up, we find there really is a bunch of crazy mega-rich scheming to own the world:
...thanks to Trump, it was a nonstarter. Where FARA had once been the lodestar for foreign lobbying legislation around the world, Bondi announced that it was now effectively dead— and all that information and transparency that Americans once had access to would be no more. 750 In another memo, Bondi declared that the Trump administration was also dissolving another prong of the US’s fight against kleptocracy: the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. First created in 2017— during Trump’s first term, ironically— the group had quickly transformed into the US’s leading tool for tracking and tracing foreign influence campaigns around the country, dedicated to dismantling infiltration campaigns out of places like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and more.
- Next on the chopping block was the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. Inaugurated in 2010, this was a body dedicated to freezing, seizing, and repatriating assets linked to dirty money networks around the world, who often plowed their illicit wealth directly into the US. While this task force was always fighting an uphill battle— the millions it returned hardly compared to the billions (or more) pilfered around the world— it nonetheless stood as a testament to the US’s public willingness to go after these networks. In Nigeria, in Malaysia, in Uzbekistan—
- These are all a jumble of names and acronyms, neologisms unfamiliar to those outside Washington. But pulling back, one thing from Bondi’s memos was clear: In a single day, just a few weeks into Trump’s new administration, the US had eliminated or kneecapped its most successful and most prominent counter-kleptocracy tools. Years of progress had been undone.
- Trump simply announced that there was a whole suite of legislation that folks no longer needed to worry about. He had created a new legal architecture by fiat, providing a public road map for as much white-collar crime as crooked regimes and corrupt oligarchs could want. And still, he wasn’t done. While he was busy dismantling legislation, he was also busy creating new ways to attract illicit wealth into the US. One of his new tools was the creation of a so-called “gold card” visa scheme. Sitting in the Oval Office, Trump hawked a “path to citizenship” for anyone who could pay $ 5 million. Anyone— any drug lord, any human rights abuser, any oligarch around the world— who could meet that fee could visit the US, setting them on a path to American citizenship.
- Leaving aside all the raging concerns about the world Altman’s ChatGPT has helped create— the rampant copyright violations, the environmental damage, the collapse in students’ abilities to craft their own essays, and more— Altman’s willingness to back Praxis’s vision of a post-nation future raises questions about not only his own political leanings, but about his vision for the future of the United States itself.
- According to a number of sources, a range of “Silicon Valley tech investors” have begun “promoting the frozen island as a site for a so-called freedom city, a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation.” Aligning with Praxis’s vision for a network state in Greenland, Reuters reported that these oligarchic investors envisioned transforming Greenland into a paradise of scientific, even utopian, invention, building the island into a “hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches,
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Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Review: Introduction to Metaphysics
Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin HeideggerMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Values not enough
In 1928, there appeared the first part of a collected bibliography on the concept of value. It cites 661 publications on the concept of value. Probably by now there are a thousand. All this calls itself philosophy. In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], 115 is fishing in these troubled waters of "values" and "totalities."
Yet we can see how stubbornly the thought of values entrenched itself in the nineteenth century when we see that even Nietzsche, and precisely he, thinks completely within the perspective of the representation of values. The subtitle to his projected main work, The Will to Power, is Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. Its third book is headed: Attempt at a New Positing of Values. Because Nietzsche was entangled in the confusion of the representation of values, because he did not understand its questionable provenance, he never reached the genuine center of philosophy. But even if some future thinker should reach the center again-we today can only labor to pave the way-he will not avoid entanglement either; it will just be a different entanglement. No one can leap over his own shadow.
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Friday, June 5, 2026
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Wednesday, June 3, 2026
Review: Scrivener User Manual
Scrivener User Manual by Literature & LatteMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I am reading September 2025 Revision 3.1.6.0-01c at 774 pages.
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Review: Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President
Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President by J.H. HatfieldMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Neo nazi
BCCI: Wikipedia https://share.google/uE9TKHvTG6lPKcq0z
(BCCI), which at one time had more than 400 branches in 78 countries with assets of more than $20 billion, including drug-trafficking and arms-smuggling proceeds, looted savings and loans, and defrauded depositors of legitimate financial institutions. As he had done in 1977, when anoth-er BCCI figure, James Bath, invested heavily in Arbusto Energy, Bush was once again doing business with people who had ties to BCCI, commonly referred to by the U.S. Justice Department as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals."
It was the Little Rock investment firm who handled the brokerage when Middle Eastern front men for BCCI made an early attempt to pur-chase First American Bank in Washington, D.C. (BCCI later acquired First American's predecessor, Financial General Bankshares.) Stephens, Inc. also played a significant role in introducing the BCCI virus into U.S. banking when it arranged the sale of Bert Lance's National Bank of Georgia to Ghaith Pharoan, identified by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a "front man" for BCCI's secret acquisitions of American banks.
At the time of the Harken investment, UBS was a joint-venture part-ner with BCCI in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland. According to Congressional hearings transcripts, UBS also helped BCCI skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out of the country in private jets, and was involved in Ferdinand Marcos' illegal transportation of 325 tons of gold out of the Philippines.
Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and in the book False Profits by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, had been an investment partner in Saudi Arabia with BCCI front man Gaith Pharoan. Khalid bin Mahfouz, another BCCI figure and head of the largest bank in the Arabian Peninsula, was Bakhsh's banker
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Saturday, May 30, 2026
Review: The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation
The Snow Killings: Inside the Oakland County Child Killer Investigation by Marney Rich KeenanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
...all believed that Busch had likely died days earlier, Sillery determined Busch died that same day—November 20, 1978—of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Other than noting that Busch’s blood alcohol level was 0.41 percent—more than four times the legal limit for driving and enough to cause coma or death—there was no indication that a full autopsy was ever even conducted.
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Friday, May 29, 2026
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Thursday, May 21, 2026
Review: Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan
Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan by Daniel CzitromMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Telegraph transportation
Movies represented "the most spectacular single feature of the amusement situation in recent years," a situation that included penny arcades, dance academies and dance halls, vaudeville and burlesque theaters, pool rooms, amusement parks, and even saloons. Motion pictures inhabited the physical and psychic space of the urban street life. Standing opposite these commercial amusements, in the minds of the cultural traditionalists, were municipal parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums, school recreation centers, YMCAs, and church-sponsored recreation. The competition between the two sides, noted sociologist Edward A. Ross, was nothing less than a battle between "warring sides of human nature-appetite and will, impulse and reason, inclination and ideal." The mushrooming growth of movies and other commercial amusements thus signaled a weakness and per-haps a fundamental shift in the values of American civilization.
"Why has the love of spontaneous play," wondered Reverend Richard H. Edwards, "given way so largely to the love of merely being amused?"
For those who spoke about "the moral significance of play" and preferred the literal meaning of the term recreation, the flood of commercial amusements posed a grave cultural threat. Most identified the amusement situation as inseparable from the expansion of the city and factory labor. Referring to the enormous vogue of the movies in Providence, Rhode Island before World War I, Francis R. North noted the "great alluring power in an amusement ..."
Propaganda analysis emerged as a significant new activity after the armistice. During the Great War propaganda had become a massive scientific endeavor, a sophisticated art critical to the military efforts of all the combatants. Utilizing the latest forms of modern communication, nations made propaganda a regular feature of governing-a tendency that continued after the war's end. Propaganda acquired a sinister connotation; it meant partisan appeal based on half-truths and devious manipulation of communications channels. A postwar wave of autobiographies, exposés, and popular articles helped further a belief in the deceitful power of propaganda and the ease with which modern media could be insidiously controlled in its service. The scholarly studies of propaganda generally took these fears as their starting point.
For example, Harold Lasswell's pioneer work, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), began by noting: "We live among more people than ever who are puzzled, uneasy, or vexed at the un-known cunning which seems to have duped and degraded them. It is often an object of vituperation, and therefore, of interest, discussion, and, finally, of study." Lasswell sought to classify the mechanisms, tactics, and strategies of propaganda, which he defined as "the control of opinion by significant symbols... by stories, rumors, reports, pictures, and other forms of social communication." Other propaganda studies in these years also directed attention to how the modern media operated and how they could be abused for propaganda purposes in various countries, particularly during wartime.
Innis
In McLuhan's view, southern culture stood as a modern manifestation of the Cinesniam deal of rational man reaching his noblest attainment in the expression of an eloquent wisdom." According to McLuhan, ever since Socrates used dialectics against the rhetoric of his sophist teachers, a continuing quarrel had raged over whether grammar and rhetoric on the one hand or dialectics on the other should prevail in organizing knowledge. The debate continued among medieval and Renaissance authorities, with the Schoolmen Insisting that one part of the trivium be the superior method in the-ology (dialectics) and the humanists insisting on the others (gram-mar, rhetoric). As the quarrel heightened in seventeenth-century England, representatives of both parties migrated to America the Schoolmen to New England and the quasi-humanist gentry to Virginia.
In America, McLuhan argued, the two radically opposed intellectual traditions developed on new soil and were geographically separated for the first time. Nourished by the agrarian estate life of the South, the Ciceronian ideal reached its flower in "the scholar states-man of encyclopedic knowledge, profound practical experience, and voluble social and public eloquence." It produced, among other things, the most creative tradition in American political thought, a tradition that stretched from Jefferson to Wilson. It advocated an agrarian society with every man as aristocrat and subordinated knowledge and action to a political good. On the other hand, the New England mind afforded a sharp contrast. Based on the Ramist application of dialectics to theological controversy, it embodied a thoroughly different tradition: "For this mind there is nothing which cannot be settled by method. It is the mind which weaves the intricacies of efficient production, 'scientific' scholarship, and business administration. It doesn't permit itself an inkling of what constitutes a social or political problem... simply because there is no method for tackling such problems." McLuhan thus reduced Ameri-can history to an internal debate within the medieval trivium. Southern literature's stress on passion versus the northern concern with character, the Civil War, and the educational debate at Chicago over the "Great Books" program all reflected the intellectual struggle of the humanist against the technological specialist. McLuhan left no doubt where his own sympathies lay. His affinity with the southern Agrarian movement of the 1920s and 1930s is striking. McLuhan, the Catholic and provincial Canadian, joined John Crowe Ransom in celebrating the South as the true inheritor of the humanist tradition...
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Wednesday, May 20, 2026
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Review: Out of the Corner
Out of the Corner by Jennifer Grey My rating: 4 of 5 stars View all my reviews
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Managing in Turbulent Times by Peter F. Drucker My rating: 5 of 5 stars Drucker's career as a business thinker took off in 194... -
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents by David Pietrusza My rating: 3 of 5 stars The presidential electio...
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Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA by John Lisle My rating: 4 of 5 stars ...
