After Such Knowledge

  Mackinder's Heartland (which is still a real thing) is being surrounded and sabotaged. This piece claims that Washington is engineering it successfully except the China–Iran–Türkiye axis, leaving Beijing with only one viable land route to Europe. Here's the list: the Northern Corridor (Russia) is dead due to sanctions and Europe's Russophobia. The Middle Corridor (Caucasus) has been destabilized by U.S./NATO influence in Armenia, Azerbaijan–Iran tensions, and Turkish opportunism.  The Caspian / Black Sea routes have been undermine likewise by U.S. pressure, instability, and China abandoning the Georgian deep‑water port. The North–South Corridor (Russia–Iran–India) is collapsing because India is drifting into the U.S.–Israel orbit. The Arctic / Baltic routes are militarized and increasingly blocked by NATO. The Maritime routes are disrupted by U.S. naval actions and the “Malacca toll booth” threat. These are the core claims. The article concludes that Iran is now the indis...

The Time of Troubles follows a period of flourishing when growth declines, class struggles intensify, and there's a surge of acting-out. This is because restrictive policies replace more functional processes like innovation and surplus reinvestment as organizations harden into rigid institutions protecting elite privileges at the expense of adaptability. Our present crisis dates back to around 1890 when what I call good honest prosperous growth stalled in the West. Thne our country made up a Big Excuse (who really sank the Maine in Havana Harbor anyhow?) Reversed growth rates "remedied" by so-called "policies of protection" for vested interests has struck the West before, favoring consumers first (~1400), traders (~1750), then producers (~1930). These policies bureaucratize society, stifling inventiveness and punishing change, which fragments the core (elite centers) from the periphery. So while we were shooting up Cuba, conditions closer to the center were buil...

The secondary market emerges the moment a security has been issued once and becomes transferable — but historically, this separation crystallized in the early 17th century with the Dutch and English joint‑stock companies. When a market for resale peels away from the market for issuance is one of those deep structural thresholds in capitalism. The structural moment: 1602–1698   The secondary market becomes a distinct institution only when shares become alienable, durable, and widely held enough to circulate independently of the issuing company. That happens in three linked steps: 1. 1602 – The Dutch East India Company (VOC) creates permanent, transferable shares. Before this, “shares” in merchant ventures were typically tied to a single voyage and liquidated afterward. There was no need for a resale market. The VOC’s innovation:   - permanent capital (no liquidation after each voyage); - transferable shares recorded in a ledger; - a large, dispersed investor base. Thi...

Putin’s strategic grammar doesn’t fit this war. Everything we know — from public analysis, academic work, and reporting — shows that Russia’s leadership tends to operate through: - Localized disruption, not global system‑wide rebalancing   - Opportunistic sabotage, not long‑horizon financial choreography   - Regional leverage, not planetary supply‑chain modulation   - Cost‑imposition on adversaries, not the creation of new global architectures  Analysts often describe Russia’s posture as revisionist but capacity‑limited* — meaning it tries to reshape its immediate environment, but it doesn’t have the institutional reach to orchestrate a world‑system shock of this magnitude. Nothing in publicly available reporting suggests that Russia is directing, influencing, or benefiting from the U.S. prosecution of the war in Iran in a way that resembles authorship. If anything, the war creates volatility that Russia can exploit tactically — but that’s very differe...

Raphael Patai was trying to explain a historical survival strategy, not an innate cultural destiny. When you read him charitably, the core claim is something like this: 1. Repeated conquest → preference for kin-based security.  Across the Arabian Peninsula and much of the Fertile Crescent, political authority was: - frequently overturned   - externally imposed   - unreliable as a guarantor of justice or property   - often extractive rather than protective   In such an environment, impersonal public authority was not a stable bet. What was stable? - your clan   - your lineage   - your reciprocal obligations   - your honor network   - your ability to mobilize kin for protection   This is not unique to Arabs. It’s the same pattern you see in: - the Pashtun highlands   - the Caucasus   - premodern Sicily   - the Scottish Highlands   - the Balkans  ...

My protest began as an involuntary esthetic revulsion. The moral panic and existential dread came later. One of my sources believed Western civilization didn’t grow continuously but in pulses, each one emerging after a trough,  reorganizing institutions, producing a burst of creativity, and then stabilizing into a plateau. Greek letters were his way of marking these pulses as structural phases, not moral judgments. Well, I made some. Never forget that Hitler was an artist manqué. I can't really say the same thing about Napoleon, but he became necessary after the French Revolution failed to solve its problem. This is where Kroeber is more subtle than people often remember. He acknowledge that conflict, war, and coercive power are part of culture. What he resisted was letting war drive the structure of his cultural‑growth model. As if to prove this, napoleon did solve France's problem; then he went to war - after he made it unnecessary. By reforming France's provincial struct...