After Such Knowledge

The Neoconfederate alliance is smaller, weaker, and more brittle than it was in the Gingrich–Bush era, but it is not gone. What survives are the institutional husks and funding pipelines that don’t require Big Oil’s old sovereignty to function. So once you remove Big Oil as an independent sovereign bloc, The MIC as a semi-autonomous policy‑setting actor, NAM as a unified industrial front, and the GOP donor ecosystem as a coherent class project, what’s left is a patchwork of legacy institutions, ideological mills, and regional power centers that still animate the Neoconfederate project even after its economic base collapsed. 👴 Koch Network — the last fully functional command node. The Koch apparatus is the closest thing to a surviving sovereign in the old Neoconfederate coalition. (The emoji is supposed to be Bob Welch.) What they still control: ■ Americans for Prosperity (ground game + candidate pipeline) ⏹️State Policy Network (50‑state ALEC‑style policy shops) ✳️Donor Trusts (dark‑m...

Since Trump weaponized USAID I've been aware of a real tension baked into the veriest yea-lawd structure of U.S. Cold War strategy. The contradiction I'm feeling comes from trying to reconcile two different genealogies inside American foreign policy: 🔢 A Wilsonian–New Deal humanitarian tradition (aid, development, institution‑building)... 🔀 A Japanese‑imperial, empire‑management style adopted during the Cold War (client states, militarized peripheries, technocratic elites, anti‑communist containment). These two lineages coexisted inside the same state apparatus, often in the same decade, sometimes in the same foreign country. The “Imperial Japanese” style (which even overruled Hirohito)  isn’t about ethnicity or culture — it’s about institutional technique. After 1945, the U.S. absorbed: 💁🏽 Japanese imperial administrative structures in Korea, Taiwan, and parts of Southeast Asia; Japanese-trained technocrats (especially in Taiwan and South Korea); Japanese-style development...

The City of London is the oldest continuous political corporation in the Western world. Its sovereignty is damn peculiar. It predates the English nation‑state, the Norman monarchy, and the modern conception of sovereignty. Its earliest functions were those of a merchant commune—a self‑governing association of traders who secured: - rights of passage   - rights of market   - rights of adjudication   These were not granted by the Crown; they were recognized by it. The City’s autonomy was therefore not a concession but a survival. In Hall's terms, this is civilization's tapeworm, contending with the body politic for the status of currency-issuer. In institutional terms, the City began as an instrumentality for regulating commerce in a pre‑national environment. Its purpose was clear: to facilitate the exchange of goods and the protection of merchants. But unlike most instrumentalities of the medieval period, the City did not institutionalize into rigidity. It p...

The ecological and interlocked civilizational crisis is not primarily technological but historical and cultural, rooted in the long development of Western attitudes toward nature and human relations. His causal structure falls into three connected domains. First is our historical attitudes toward nature, especially the dualistic view separating humanity from nature. This led to the belief that nature exists to be mastered, dominated, or exploited. This in turn led to the rise of instrumental rationality—valuing efficiency and control over ecological balance. The crisis must be understood through the history of how our present attitudes toward nature and our fellows came into existence. The way that technology is applied outpaces ecological knowledge, creating effects we cannot predict. Our science encourages linear thinking in a nonlinear ecological world. DDT is a good example. On the institutional scale there are several factors. Economic systems that reward short‑term gains over lon...

  Groups and organizations forget their original purposes; means become ends; plebs revolt. This is the basic problem societies fail to solve. Now we're stuck with a messianic religion that can tear the country in half. What I fail to understand is how the preceding Mammonism didn't set off alarms. Too close to the American heart, I reckon. Now THERE was a cult! Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon — or so it seemed to me in high school. Arnold Toynbee has pretty much fallen down the memory hole, but in the mid-20th century his reputation was considerable. I'm sure I learned his name from Clarke, who mentions him fairly often, in one story even naming a spaceship Arnold Toynbee. Oddly, Clarke never much worked the future-history street corner. I don't know if Asimov ever mentions Toynbee, but A Study of History is the perfect companion piece for the Foundation Trilogy. Like Spengler, Toynbee was big on the grand cycles of history, the rise and...