Having recently experienced violent idealists roaming our streets, burning things, breaking things and generally enjoying the fact that they can scare people, I think a brief explanation of how idealism leads to destruction and death is in order. The Two…

(Originally published August 31, 2020.) I’ve gone on for a long time about fear making humans stupid, and even about it being a weapon and a brain poison. But I’ve also wondered at times whether people would hit fear-fatigue… that point where people have…

All of us with husbands and wives are beautifully positioned to make them better human beings. Unfortunately, many of us are squandering the opportunity. Today I’d like to help fix that. With the possible exception of your children, there is no one you’re…

The title of this post, live dangerously and you live right, comes from the great author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he was ever so correct. The life of meek obedience is a sin against the self. It is a surrender of mind and passion. It’s a half life…

(Originally published in September of 2020.) As we grew up, nearly all of us were inundated with stories of our glorious national fathers, our beautiful democracies, and so on. And being young, we for the most part believed them. The system gave us our prosperity…

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Millions of decent people are spending their time and energy, trying to identify the secret bad guys of the world, then to prove that they’re right. This is a serious problem, especially because monster hunts divert people with strong ethics from building…

It struck me some time ago that the people we think of as “geniuses” tend to arrive, over time, at surprisingly similar sets of conclusions. It further strikes me that a simple list of such thoughts might be of value. And so, here is a list pulled from my…

Guilt, as I’ve noted before, is the great vulnerability of the Western world. I’ll pass up an explanation of why for today, but the validity of this statement is made ever so clear by the fact that political types rise to power by championing one class or…

There’s a common refrain that “Bitcoin fixes this.” Sometimes it’s used well and other times less so (it would often be more accurate to say “bitcoiners fix this”), but I’m being very serious when I say that Bitcoin fixes society. Bitcoin changes the incentives…

America, 1910 1910 was well before my own time, of course, but I knew at least ten people who lived through it as adults, and discussed the era at some length with one of them, my great uncle Dave. And so this is an era I feel I can still reach out and touch.…

19th Century America If we wish to grasp American life in the 19th century, it’s probably best to start by understanding that when America was young, it had no myth. Once we really understand that, the rest falls into place fairly easily. Here’s how Alexis…

(Originally published January 18, 2021.) Aside from a breathless stream of headlines and a few random inputs, I haven’t seen many facts regarding the events of January 6th. Circumstances made things that way for me, and now I’m glad they did, because it set…

America, 1776 The development of the American colonies moved in an arc. They began with a lot of oppression (after the old world model), shook it off as the arc rose toward 1776 and the revolution, then headed slowly back down. My job today is to give you…

(Originally published April 8,2021.) The past year has been a mass confusion of fear, misinformation, cover-ups, tyranny, crazed true-believers and more. Making sense of it has been difficult, and even those of us who try to do so professionally have come…

It’s late summer in Anytown, USA: A small platform stands at the edge of a cornfield. A very average-looking person steps up to a microphone and speaks: Friends, I stand here, not to praise you, but to acquaint you with reality, at least as well as I am able.…

When law was sovereign All of us in the modern West grew up believing that we were living under “the rule of law.” The truth, however, is that the rule of law – the sovereignty of law – ended a couple of centuries ago. And by losing it, we lost a primary…