After Such Knowledge

 You can blame the whole mess on the Ottoman Empire. It was one of those end-stage empires, too. Palestinians in the Levant had worked out numerous dodges around this extractive enormity. Lawrence of Arabia capitalized on the hatred felt by Arabs in general toward this Turkic "ultima ratio imperii." Yet Islamic 1.0 had gone past its expiration date from an overripe apple to an "apple of Sodom."* The Brits did all they could to prop the Ottomans up against Russia. It had to fall like Hindu 1.0 did. Its successor-state is fascinating. The crisis of these countries is a crisis of the system itself, the collapse of Islamic Civilization culminating in the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire that ruled over it in his later stages. The Near East is the wreckage of this civilization, and therefore presents problems far greater than the simple one of scarce natural resources. Rather it's a triple problem of resources, beliefs, that complicated thought-and-reflex pattern ...

I'm feeling much better about Machado now. She is not a Latina version of the Fox-Trump Blondes. Latin America and parts of South Asia (like Pakistan) form a kind of axis — not through direct alliance, but through shared structural traits: Weak national institutions Persistent oligarchic control Resistance to Western-style modernization Cultural fragmentation and colonial legacies This “axis” is less about geography and more about civilizational inertia — regions stuck between tradition and modernity, often manipulated by external powers but never fully absorbed. If we think in “ecolutionary” terms — evolutionary dynamics applied to cultural and political ecosystems — then Machado represents a mutational force within the Venezuelan subsystem: She’s disruptive to the entrenched Bolivarian model. She seeks institutional regeneration through liberal democracy and market reform. Her movement is adaptive, responding to ecological collapse (economic, social, political). In this sense, Ma...

  Few things are as offensive as the religious giddiness associated with prosperity, especially among the Trumpists. But when you consider the life-or-death circumstances of economics, the connection is psychologically and emotionally necessary. Or so I tell myself when I try to be objective. Starting with the first civilizations, Egypt began as a command economy presided over by a sacral king. Mesopotamian Civilization was under the control of a priesthood. The "megamachine" that (unromantically) makes the civilization go may be called a surplus-accumulating wealth-creating instrumentality. This can be shortened to surplus-creating because it adds to the real wealth available. When it works tolerably well, the surplus increases. The condition of workability is the reinvestment of part of this surplus into improved productive apparatus, whether organizations or tools like hoes and watergates. Such an instrumentality is an essential part of a civilization. There is always a ma...

Conative psychology is the lesser-known sibling of cognitive, affective, and behavioral psychology — but it plays a crucial role in understanding human motivation and volition. While cognitive psychology focuses on thinking and reasoning, and affective psychology deals with emotions, conative psychology is all about doing — our drive, willpower, and purposeful action. The term “conation” comes from the Latin 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘪, meaning “to try” or “to endeavor.” It refers to the mental faculty involved in goal-directed behavior: how we initiate, persist in, and regulate actions based on our desires and intentions. In other words, conation is what bridges the gap between knowing and doing. Here are a few key aspects of conative psychology: - Volition and agency: It explores how people make choices and commit to them, even in the face of obstacles. - Motivated behavior: It examines the internal forces that push us to act beyond just instinct or emotion. - Self-regulation: It includes how we ma...

I've looked at the historical record and seen that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls. This includes South Korea and Mexico. My second take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street — an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was. Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around h...

Alas, their paradigms and terms of discourse are dieux-dieux. It's why I trashed that Blakely gal from offa here. All have to go. It's a clearance sale, a liquidation! Not that it hasn't been like Black Friday every goddam day since the Reago-Thatcher Pod-People Takeover. Even in those ritzy stores in the brick-and-mortar malls. Nonetheless the urge to refute and rebuke and revile my rivals at the next ISCSC conference remains strong and renitent, so here goes... Leaving our civ's intellectual plane, where this Maslovian need is being poorly served, let's turn to the economic level. I am not insisting on using the combined expression "political economy" today. We oughta, but Western history did not begin with centralized public authority. The abortive Carolingian kingdom does not count and should never have been. Here we are faced with a series of complex developments. Wouldn't it be nice if we could ignore 'em, but we can't because economic is...

 About that Technocracy map... I submit that we already live in one. When doing "my own research" (oy jeez) I found this very small compact book by a woman whose name I can't remember. Printed during the Depression, it listed and described alternative economic systems much in the news. Fascism's advertised theory was in it. So was Communism. These were fresh back then. Technocracy was in there. I think Social Credit was too. Not the Chicom arm-twisting but something dreamed up by an engineer named Douglas. When I started becoming interested in the Progressive political movements of the North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin arc, there was a sense these folks had created their politics from their interaction between a harsh environment and the plundering robber barons who made their existence infinitely worse than it had to be.  These political movements owed their philosophical ideas to a lot of things but their curiosity was directed by their real economic dilemmas.  The...