We cage, torture, and kill human beings based on a theory that punishment changes behavior. Can we test this theory? Um, no. No ethics board will let you cage and torture people for years to see how it ‘works’. Incarceration is too fucked up to study, but somehow totally fine to do.

We are living inside a deeply unethical psychological experiment, which neither asks for consent nor delivers results. Besides being unethical, besides being psychologically and socially devastating, mass incarceration doesn’t even work.

In every possible way, throwing people in cages is just wrong.

Cars are heavily armored, highly dangerous beasts. They move more of themselves than us, and kill more people than any other predator. They consume huge amounts of resources to just exist, and the roads and parking they demand both destroy and heat cities. Slightly improving cars is not going to do shit for our climate. We need to drop a meteor on them and evolve.

Electric cars are, in fact, a false hope. They’re the idea that we can have our cake and eat it too, and we just can’t. We’re having a planetary heart attack right now. We need…

Tony Soprano was TV’s first anti-hero, but the show still has a hero. It’s his wife, Carmela. In a very Gita or Kannagi sense, she’s a dharmic hero. She does her duty. She’s a good wife to a bad man. She’s the hero to his anti-hero.

Dharma

I used to be a news junkie. I’d take tab after tab every day, but then I’d just need more the next day. One day I just quit, cold-turkey. I’m honestly better informed, or at least marginally less stupid.

I’m not saying that news doesn’t have its place, but if you’re trying to be a better citizen — as in a better person — it’s not very good for that. For example, citizenship itself is “complacency, hypocrisy, and domination,” but the news won’t tell you that. You’d need to read a book.

News is the art of surprising people within…

Conspiracy theories are #goals. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “the discovery of the Nazis was that the masses were not so frightened by Jewish world rule as they were interested in how it could be done.”

The Nazis were quite openly inspired by their own conspiracy theories. As Himmler said, “we owe the art of government to the Jews,” namely, to the Protocols which “the Fuhrer [had] learned by heart.” This was a common antisemitic idea.

It’s over. The pandemic has gone endemic. We’re stuck with this shit forever. COVID-19 has mutated around all defenses and is becoming another neglected tropical disease. We simply cannot eliminate it now, it’s too far gone. Our children, our grandchildren will forever live with some form of COVID-19.

The tragedy is that we didn’t just lose. Rich/western countries sold us all out. This isn’t really a tragedy at all. It’s a crime.

How It Could Have Been

It didn’t have to be this way.

Imagine if every country reacted like China, completely eliminating the disease? In fact, many countries did. Places like Taiwan, Mongolia, New…

In her book Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described what I call the four horsemen of a totalitarian apocalypse.

1. Conspiracy theories
2. ‘Stupid’ people, well-organized
3. Wishful thinking
4. Loneliness

America today has all four, galloping apace.

60% of the population believes in some sort of conspiracy theory. A major political party is taken over by the ‘stupid’ mob. And people are not taking it seriously. They’re not learning from history, not believing what their enemies say, refusing to consider where this all leads.

Americans simply think totalitarianism isn’t possible for them, but this is wishful thinking. People died for the information that everything is…

After a parent dies, Kongzi (Confucius) said you’re supposed to wear sackcloth and live silently in a hut for years. This made as little sense in 500 BC as it does now, and so his disciple Zizhang asked. What does this mean?