A money economy takes the disconnection, and therefore the failure, one step further. The higher the level of economic development, the more money tends to become an abstraction rather than a counter for something concrete. Thus the economy can boom as the ecology disintegrates. This is particularly true if the society resorts to currency debasement or loose credit as a way to evade encroaching physical limits and foster an artificial prosperity, for then the economy becomes completely unhinged from concrete ecological reality. Overshoot and collapse is the inevitable result.
Propaganda is a campaign to influence public opinion without regard for truth, often (but not always) conducted by a state actor seeking some political outcome. It can exploit misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and what has recently been called mal-information (information which is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary.
As America has become more unequal over the past five decades, its levels of trust have declined sharply. African Americans feel, with great justification, that they live in a separate and unequal world, one that is subject to different laws, standards, and attitudes than the world of White Americans.
The amount of ingenuity we require to achieve a given goal depends critically on two things: first, the intrinsic difficulty of achieving the goal and, second, the kinds and amounts of resources that we have available and that we can manipulate to achieve the goal.
Any food is a dessert if any form of sugar is one of the first three ingredients. Trader Joe’s Beef and Broccoli (32 grams of sugar) is a dessert. Chinese chicken salad is a dessert. We, and especially our kids, are eating and drinking dessert all day long. It captivates our brain’s reward center . . . , similar to drugs, so kids get hooked on sugar early.
The Fed was a competent, high-functioning piece of the U.S. state apparatus. As such, it had unsurprisingly attracted Trump’s ire in the years prior to 2020.
Many ancient authors extolled the virtues of experiment and observation.9 But the Alexandrians, for all their research grants, found it a good deal harder to learn from experience than to praise doing so. The fields in which the careful recording of observational data perhaps went furthest in antiquity were divination and astrology. Cicero reports the Stoic arguments for divination and their replies to the Skeptics. It is an important passage both for its suggestion that in sciences without certainty a reasonable level of mistakes can be tolerated without that making the science worthless, and also for its use of random phenomena similar to dice throwing as a model of uncertainty.
