(Originally published in 2015) Not too many years back, warnings of Peak Oil circulated widely, and they made me consider something a good deal more dangerous: Peak Obedience. If that concept strikes you as odd, there’s a reason: We’ve all been living inside…

I was introduced to Ben Hecht, many years ago now, by my friend Paul Greenfield. Like most people of my generation I had never heard of him. He had been fairly famous some decades earlier, know early for his cynical and cutting criticisms, then as Hollywood’s…

For more than two years I wrote a free monthly newsletter called Individual Virtue. Recently I’ve received some interest in those articles, so I thought I’d republish some of them (with light editing). This is the first. Confidence and Courage All of us enjoy…

Inertia is a human frailty. Too often, we go along to get along. We conform. Because of this, those who claim authority can get most of us to do their bidding if it comes with a plausible justification and is only incremental. We get nickel-and-dimed to death…

Status is: a person’s condition, position, or standing relative to that of others. Please read that definition again and consider this slowly: Status automatically creates division and conflict. Status forces us to think in terms of position, hierarchy, and…

Prepare your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns for Q4's seasonal surge with effective strategies. Discover best practices for audience segmentation, query funnelling, product categorisation, and profitability-based approaches to maximise revenue and optimise campaign…

About half the time it is used, the word “law” is fairly close to a mind trick, and there is nothing noble, righteous, or even ‘conservative’ in that. More or less all of us were pushed into the trick, which complicates things because people don’t like to…

My dream of what could be. In 2016, after realizing that humanity had been at war for some 6,000 years with seldom a break of even a single year – and very often in a dozen places at once – a simple thought appeared in at least a hundred young minds scattered…

Most people, sad to say, are too rushed, frightened, and confused to think about what they really want out of life. They are hustled through school, forced into long-term decisions before they’re ready to face them, then held to those decisions by fear and…

Every time I write one of these pieces, a certain number of people freak out, and often quite vocally. But it’s a huge mistake to define ourselves by what we’re against, and darkness is not all that exists in the world. And we are magnificent creatures. I…