After Such Knowledge

  Once culture becomes a tertium quid between humans and Nature, any animal drawn into this cultural membrane becomes part of our symbolic order — and therefore part of our moral order. But that moral order is not simple stewardship. It’s custodial, contractual, and cosmological all at once. Our responsibility to domesticated animals is not just kindness or welfare. It is the obligation to maintain the integrity of the cultural membrane that pulled them out of Nature in the first place — to ensure that their lives, forms, and futures are not degraded by the very symbolic systems that redefined them. Culture domesticates animals by rewriting their ontology. Domestication is not merely taming. It is symbolic capture. A wolf becomes a dog not because its genome changes, but because culture assigns it a role, a meaning, a place in human ritual, a place in human labor, as well as a place in human affection. Domesticated animals are semiotic beings. They exist inside the human symbolic o...

Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. Private equity is certainly a major force in U.S. industry, and activist investors are increasingly using national‑security narratives. But the Cleary Gottlieb analysis shows that the Trump administration’s equity interventions are government-driven, not PE-driven. Competing with PE. Ruling-class tools have turned against their sponsors before. The beneficiaries in these cases are indeed often the companies themselves, whose stock prices rise when the government takes a stake — not private equity firms. Trump (or more likely the Administration) is centralizing control by having the federal government take ownership stakes in strategically important firms. Justified under econ sec = nat'l sec but experts cite legal dubiety, risks corruption and conflicts of interest. Shareholders are suing arguing the Admin is illegally using laws meant for supply‑chain resilience to justify becoming a shareholder. This is the STATE acquiring equity. State ...

Lacanian objet petit a phantoms. In Lacanian terms, a child raised without love may form a “ghost” in the psyche — a persistent lack that haunts desire. It is not a being but a structural absence that behaves like one, shaping the symbolic order. Winnicott’s false self. When a child receives no attuned care, they may develop a “false self” — a protective apparition that stands in for the real self. It is a spirit of adaptation born from emotional starvation. Collective egregores of neglect. In occult theory, an egregore can form not only from shared intention but from shared deprivation — a group’s unspoken wounds coalescing into a psychic entity. A Toynbeean Time of Troubles practically breeds deprivation‑spirits — not necessarily literal ghosts, but the whole spectrum of psychic, cultural, and mythic entities formed from lack, from emotional starvation to institutional collapse. "Interesting Times" as a generator of “privation spirits”. An Epochal Crisis is defined by: Inst...

Got Sagan on my mind. It’s not widely documented online. It comes from one of William Irwin Thompson’s spoken stories—something he told in lectures and seminars rather than in his published books. Thompson often used H.G. Wells’s idea of a “Freemasonry of Science”—a transnational ethical brotherhood of scientists—to illustrate moments when scientific elites almost acted as a planetary moral order. The episode is his claim that Werner Heisenberg briefly considered organizing a kind of secret international scientific compact during the early atomic era. Thompson said that Heisenberg, horrified by the implications of nuclear chain reactions, contemplated whether scientists across nations might quietly agree not to pursue the bomb—essentially a real-world version of Wells’s imagined “Freemasonry of Science.” The idea was that scientists, not governments, understood the danger first. They might form a moral fraternity transcending national loyalties. They could collectively refuse to weapon...

Thorstein Veblen, who invented Institutional Analysis on his personal quest for the origin of evil, would have called Larry Fink a predator and compare him to one of the Bronze Age invaders who supported himself by plunder and raiding the villages of sedentary farmers who are the real creators of wealth, defined as whatever meets human needs, the good and useful things and the artisan's tools that make them. Veblen came from what I call the "real original Populists", settlers in the Midwest bringing agrarian traditions dating back to the cooperative communitarian ethic that somehow survived from the Neolithic. It was perverted by the time George Wallace got ahold of it. I call Fink a parasite. A taker instead of a maker. Like the Bronze Age invader who conquered an agrarian society, he sets himself up like a lord demanding tribute in exchange for protection from other raiders. (The Kirghiz steppes were a crappy place to live until the plow was invented.) Finance can start...

Tired of this Wolff guy, but I can't diss Hall so easy. It's microhistory. His specific date of 2400 BCE is too neat and sharp and unsupported. What IS supported is the macrohistorical pattern: private creditors and public issuers have been in structural tension since the earliest recorded economies. JC is in the Temple. 2400 BCE is an interpretive claim, a rhetorical flourish instead of a documented event. Even so, the presence of private bankers and credit systems are documented. So is the struggle between moneylenders and public currency-issuers all the way back into the Bronze Age. Call the former "private credit actors". The Bronze Age is called the Archaic Age. Fast forward past 1200 BCE, the start of the Iron Age, to the Classical period (5th–4th century BCE), when private bankers were financing commercial ventures, managing risk, and lending capital. Archaeology suggests similar market structures existed centuries earlier in the Aegean Bronze Age. This matches...