What Science Loses When T. Rex Becomes a Trophy
Shared natural heritage, on the auction block.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
Coffee Break: Health Care Digest
Part the First: Profit in Medicine. In a report that will tug at the heartstrings of everyone, STAT tells us that HCA warns of lower profits in its future as more patients go uninsured because ObamaCare subsidies have gone by the wayside: The country’s biggest hospital chain lowered its 2026 profit outlook on Tuesday after […]
Read more...Rob Urie: No Path Forward, No Way Back, Imperial Decline Edition
Decades of misuse of US imperial advantages, malinvestment, looting produce hopium for destructive AI deployment as a rescue for the rich.
Read more...How Apocalyptic Worldviews Are Moving from the Fringes to the Corridors of Power
Why apocalyptic concerns seem fully warranted, officials and prominent figures can use them to manipulate the public.
Read more...How Did We Get Stuck?
Much seems to be moving, but little is fundamentally changing. But can it change, or are we stuck in a particular world system?
Read more...The Peculiar Notion of “Free Stuff” in Modern American Society
Because reasons, today’s post will be something different, and more personal. I will also come close to violating Horowitz’s Rule: Never generalize about your own necessarily limited experience. Joel Horowitz was my freshman sociology teacher all those many years ago. He was in his mid-thirties when he taught us, and his PhD was a second […]
Read more...The Graham Platner Affair
A post mortem of the successful effort to end Graham Platner’s Senate bid and any future in politics.
Read more...How Stories Change the Human Brain, Empathy, Memory, and Behavior
Yves here. Stories are integral to decision-making. Prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys know well that juries reach their verdicts not on weighing evidence but on constructing the story that seems to them to fit the evidence best and then see what that means in terms of a ruling. It’s thus disconcerting to see how tech […]
Read more...How Unions Pave the Way to the American Dream
Even with rising inequality and weak labor rights, unions secure enough improvements in pay and conditions to provide some class mobility.
Read more...Culture Is the Far Right’s Secret Weapon – and It’s Winning Over Some of Europe’s Most Educated Youth
EU officials seem aghast at the fact that many citizens, particularly the young, identify with national or local culture.
Read more...A Bang or a Whimper? Comparing Imperial Collapse in the US to the UK’s Decline
Book Review: Erik Linstrum’s ‘Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire’.
Read more...The Hypersociality Hypothesis
Can hypersociality help reconcile obvious elite stupidity with top-down conspiracy theories?
Read more...Michael Hudson: How US Slave Interests Stifled US Monetary and Banking Policy Until 1913
On US 250th anniversary celebration, Michael Hudson considers the counter-revolution thesis and the role of slave capital.
Read more...Coffee Break: Apathetic Americans, Science Agonistes, and Cool Science
Part the First: Jessica Wildfire on Apathetic Americans. As a paid-up member of the Professional Managerial Class who came from a thoroughly working-class background, I tend to hear and see things differently from most of my colleagues. An enduring theme among them is “They just don’t seem to care…” Not exactly. From Heads Above Water: […]
Read more...Do Muslims Want Sharia Law in the West?
Asking about Sharia Law in the West creates an erroneous binary for Muslims, ignoring a deeper view of law, land, and the modern nation-state.
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