After Such Knowledge

If Wayne Dyer had actually sat down with Thorstein Veblen, the collision would have been spectacular—in the way tectonic plates are spectacular. You’d get uplift, subduction, and probably a few new mountain ranges in the landscape of American self‑help and social theory. Let me sketch the fault lines and then the synthesis, because the fun is in the friction. Osiris roams the skies in his mirror-hulled Conscience Egg, following the Mediterranean subduction arc from the Strait of Gibraltar to where it ends at the Zagros Fold‑and‑Thrust Belt where Zeus parried Atlantis's scalar howitzer projection and caused the Seymareh Landslip, the biggest landslide for 10,000 years. The traumatized Sumerians remembered it as Anu's rebuke of an impudent mountain - also a wrathful sky-father who in this mythos is oft-troubled by mountains with personalities who forget their place in the scheme of things and become prideful. Now even the European canal where the Wandervogel wanderers once trampe...

 Our species is not bound to any particular ecological niche. Culture is the reason. Culture is a system of behavioral adaptations. Physical anthropologists have over‑emphasized bones and tools and under‑emphasized behavioral patterns—cooperation, communication, avoidance strategies, and emotional/intellectual development. These are cultural capacities. Early hominids survived predators not through physical strength but through nonphysical behavioral patterns, which include cooperation, communication, group coordination, and ecological adaptation from the tropical savannah to the Arctic tundra. These are the earliest forms of culture—shared learned behaviors that increase the chances of survival. Culture is an emergent layer beyond biology and tools. The four parameters of human origins are: 1. physical changes   2. artifacts (tools)   3. behavioral changes   4. ecological context   The third parameter—behavioral change—is where culture resid...

Two fictional characters have reward deficiency syndrome. Recent metaphysics prompted me to make one the reincarnation of the other. Jack Reid rescues several groups of refugees from a looming world war. An enemy sends the space habitat/lifeboat to an unknown part of the universe where they colonize an earthlike planet and face the same historical crises. Since it's too late to rectify the mistakes of America's recent past I thought I would reboot it. Americans still don't have the proper values to like lefties like Bernie and AOC, for example. Wayne Dyer never wrote about reward deficiency syndrome (RDS) directly, but his metaphysics gives me a surprisingly coherent way to interpret it. And because I’ve already been thinking about the link between neurodivergence and RDS from lived experience, I can treat Dyer’s framework as a symbolic lens rather than a clinical one. So how would Dyer’s karmic metaphysics frame Reward Deficiency Syndrome? Don't take RDS as a karmic pu...

Keep asking structural questions, not partisan ones. That makes it much easier to answer clearly and safely. If we stay at the level of institutions, historical cycles, and elite blocs, we can say something meaningful without treating this as a literal “civil war” or taking political positions. A couple of weeks ago, I said that Big Oil had "lost" the Second Civil War (which was really a nonmilitary struggle like the one that eventually broke out as the War of the Roses). By this I mean that Big Oil’s loss was structural, not military. What I really mean is: - it lost autonomy, or the capability to act on its own discretion. - it lost agenda‑setting power - it became subordinate to global finance   - it no longer drives national strategy the way it did in the mid‑20th century   This wasn’t a defeat by another faction in a battlefield sense.  It was a shift in the architecture of power. What about the military‑industrial complex (MIC)? Also part of the Neoconfede...

A genuinely important—and surprisingly understudied—historical hinge. Let me lay out the correlation cleanly, because once you see the structure, the parallel rise of Likud and New York–style neoliberalism stops looking coincidental and starts looking like two expressions of the same deeper realignment. 1. The New York Turn (1975–1976): The First Fully Articulated Neoliberal State Regime - New York’s fiscal crisis produced the first operational neoliberal state in the world—years before Thatcher or Reagan. Key legislative and institutional shifts (1975–76): - Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB)   - Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC)   - Balanced‑budget requirements - Wage freezes and union contract oversight - Creditor primacy written into state law - Shift from democratic budgeting to technocratic oversight These measures subordinated democratic claims to bondholder confidence; established austerity as a permanent governance logic; created a template for la...

  Kelcy Warren, Pipeline Mogul (albeit not an upstream oil magnate) This fellow was flanked by a chart displaying financial supporters on one side and participating oil companies on the other. I wanted to moralize on how expedient this was considering that there was a war between them. Call it the Quiet Rich versus the Noisy Rich. I didn't know I was looking at a victory dance. The Quiet Rich, the Yankees, won Civil War IIA. Don't think of personalities, think of structures and sectors. I'm thinking of the acronym I half-trusted earlier — the mouthful Shahid Bolsen uses as a kind of structural label rather than a list of people. The acronym is: OCGFC — “Owners and Controllers of Global Financialized Capital”. Bolsen uses it as a way to name what he sees as a transnational class whose power comes not from territory or industry but from control over financialized systems — capital flows, investment vehicles, and the institutional architecture of global finance. He is trying t...