Tag: conspiracy theories

Charade: As Cities Burn, Perverse Politics Prevail

January 15, 2025

What will it take to cause “shock and awe” over increasingly frequent and devastating catastrophic climate events? Consider this context: “The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows.” (see story in  The Guardian, 1/10/2025.) Climate science predicts the devastating consequences clearly. Even so, LA burning becomes … More Charade: As Cities Burn, Perverse Politics Prevail

Back to Basics: Can We Return to Reality?

March 27, 2024

Our hyper-media culture of industrial modernity tends to send us off in all sorts of directions. In fact, tangential thinking seems to dominate most discussions of important matters. For example, I have been in many discussions of how to deal with the destruction caused by the heating of the planet and the extraction of ‘resources’ … More Back to Basics: Can We Return to Reality?

Words and Deeds: Entanglements of Hope and Doom

March 16, 2023

Many years ago, I read an article by Irwin Deutscher titled, “Words and Deeds: Social Science and Social Policy.” It was his 1965 presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), published in 1966 in the journal, Social Problems. Deutscher was alluding to the fact that most of the data collected … More Words and Deeds: Entanglements of Hope and Doom

The Deep State or The Shallow State: Is That the Question?

August 18, 2022

The “deep state” has gotten a lot of press lately, mostly bad since it is deemed anti-democratic. Why is nobody talking about the “shallow state”? I’ll define what I mean by that in a minute. But first, let’s be clear about what the ‘deep state’ really is. Recently the radical right weaponized the concept of … More The Deep State or The Shallow State: Is That the Question?

Culture Decay and the Autocratic Attempt

July 18, 2022

The verified allegations of the Fake President’s autocratic attempt to throw off the bounds of democratic process to affirm the object of his self-doubt—supremacy to everyone and everything in the world—keep piling up. Yet, the present political predicament of the United States of America is quite a bit more complicated than that. Without the decay … More Culture Decay and the Autocratic Attempt

Masking Truth and Distancing Lies: Living in a Vacant Moral Universe

August 12, 2021

Life just keeps getting weirder and weirder. It is very hard to make sense out of the behavior of so many fellow humans. Some say we live in a post-truth world. What does that mean? Others claim that “alternative facts” ought to have superior standing despite contradicting the actual facts for which the evidence is … More Masking Truth and Distancing Lies: Living in a Vacant Moral Universe

Against Ideology: Creativity is Best Hope in an Uncertain World

June 17, 2021

Uncertainty is everywhere and growing fast. That makes many people uncomfortable at best, violent at worst. Most seek certainty in what they perceive as a set of beliefs that they equate with reality. When conditions appear uncertain or change quickly, certain people conclude that someone is messing with their reality. They expect to live in … More Against Ideology: Creativity is Best Hope in an Uncertain World