Cycles of Change

The outrage arrives daily. Another failure, another betrayal, another reason the other side threatens everything. The fury feels justified. It also feels endless. Modern life often involves watching systems fail while the people in charge ask for more funding. Some call this a moral hazard. It [...]

Politcal Analysis Minnesota Federal Enforcement Incidents FACTS (Directly stated, verifiable statements in NBC article) Events & People Alex Pretti was killed in Minnesota over the weekend referenced in the article Two former Democratic presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) issued public [...]

The mid-twentieth century American political environment functioned as a high-alignment operating system. During this era, the two-party duopoly acted as an efficient consensus engine because the underlying population possessed a coherent ideological signal. This phase has passed. Recent data from [...]

Complex societies operate through multi-party transactions that require trust to function. When trust degrades, these systems do not fail linearly. They collapse multiplicatively. Understanding this mechanism explains why institutional decay accelerates during periods of social upheaval and why [...]

A common question arises regarding neutrality: If an observer holds values, do they not inevitably take a side? The answer is yes. Holding values requires taking a side. The distinction lies in what the observer takes a side against. Most definitions of "taking a side" involve choosing a Tribe. [...]

The functionality of a society depends upon the structural integrity of the oversight layers that maintain the boundary between state power and the citizen. These tiers incorporate statutory frameworks, judicial oversight, and specialized institutions that monitor the internal operations of the [...]

California sits at the center of a massive financial and human crisis. Between 2018 and 2023, the state spent around twenty-four billion dollars to help homeless people. Even with this large amount of money, the number of people on the streets grew by fifty-three percent. This shows a deep system [...]

The Chinese Communist Party is currently pushing a strict and comprehensive policy called the Sinicization of Religion, which requires all religious groups to follow the state's secular ideas instead of their own spiritual beliefs. Under President Xi Jinping, the government has intensified efforts [...]

The phrase "our democracy" appears constantly in political discourse. Commentators invoke it. Politicians defend it. Citizens fear for it. Yet the term carries a fundamental imprecision that distorts public understanding of how the American system actually functions. The United States is not a [...]

The stability of modern life is ruled by the power to navigate two types of risk. The first involves low-probability, high-impact (LPHI) events, often called "Black Swans." These are rare events with extreme results. The second involves high-probability, slow-moving (HPSM) crises, known as "Grey [...]

The stability of a pluralistic society depends upon the maintenance of a "sacred canopy," which is a shared system of meaning that provides a sense of cosmic order and social security. A primary threat to this canopy is the institutional encouragement of religious mockery. This converts satire from [...]

The architecture of global reserves is reverting to physical settlement. For decades, the US Treasury bond served as the primary instrument of sovereign savings. This era is concluding. In 2024, central banks acquired one thousand and forty-five metric tons of gold. This marks the third consecutive [...]