“The mark of an educated mind,” taught Aristotle, is “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” And that’s what I’ll be asking of you today. Because as certain as I am that I’m substantially right on this, I’m also sure that its acceptance…

People frequently tell children “You can do anything you want.” And this causes a lot of confusion, because in the real world, they can’t. And after their first clash with the aforesaid real world, the child is left wondering all sorts of unpleasant things:…

A free, post-scarcity world will not be prevented by archaic systems scratching and clawing to retain their domination. We will evolve freely, unburdened by an unfortunate past. This will happen, and today I’m going to tell you why. But more than that, I…

The people who have kept the world from a slide into darkness and pulled it forward have, to a shocking extent, been heretics of one form or another. I’m using “heretic” more broadly than in just a religious context, but please consider this: It’s the punisher…

“Call me pisher” is a Yiddish phrase from my youth, and it was used to instruct me in a very important lesson. (Though I hardly realized it at the time.) And since Yiddish speakers were often not particularly delicate persons, I’ll have to be a bit less than…

I regularly go on about the necessity of forming your own opinions and making stands upon them. And while I’m quite certain about that, there’s another side to such things. We are complicated creatures, after all. The more we express and defend our own opinions…

Since the Bronze Age, human societies have been arranged around brute force. Even now, governments are monopolies of violence. More than that, the very structure of government serves one primary end: to deliver violence. All else is supplemental.

I can still remember the first time someone told me that they believed in the Calvinist doctrine of “the depravity of man.” It shocked me. To complain about human behavior I very well understood; there’s plenty of bad behavior in the world. But to flatly…

Culture has always been the antagonist of conscience. Once we see ourselves as part of a larger entity – once we identify with it – we feel a necessity to conform to it. If we don’t, we begin to lose the existential crutch that larger entities offer us. And…

A few years ago I wrote an article on status, to rather mixed reviews among the online commenters. Today I’m going back to status, “doubling down,” as people like to say these days. The proximate cause of this return to status is a set of studies I’ve been…

I believe that women are inherently as valuable as men. But I don’t believe this because of politics, I believe it because of experience. Young people are taught  that women before 1970 or so were suppressed, deprived of education and legally raped by their…

Millions of decent and hard-working people are presently coming to grips what has been happening to them, and so we’ll cover a crucial piece of the puzzle, but one that is very little known.  Regardless that the US Constitution opens with “We the people,”…

We’ve been watching the Enlightenment collapse before us in real time. This is something that adults need to understand. What remains of the Enlightenment is collapsing for structural reasons. This discourse doesn’t reat upon political or academic theories…

You can’t write about this till I’m gone,” he said, “but that won’t be long.” I hadn’t been to Jay’s Bar since the events I recorded in The Rise of The Superfluous Class, and I hadn’t intended on returning any time soon, as much as I love the place. But I…

Martin continued talking for a while, but mainly about his childhood and early career. Then he moved back to the problem that America posed to rulers. “In America, at least in the early days, people believed they were the primary factors; that they created…

File this under “needs to be said.” Ah well. The lords of Hollywood, the political elite, the educational elite… these are not uniformly stupid people. Some of them, in fact, are fairly bright. Observing them, however, might lead you to the conclusion that…

Anyone Who Goes To Work For A Central Bank Coin Is A Traitor There’s a time and place for just about everything, and this is a time to be blunt: Anyone who takes a job for a central bank or any similar entity, building a cryptocurrency, quasi-cryptocurrency…

I rather hate to do this, but these first two paragraphs seem the best way to make this very important point. Apologies. Imagine that some combination of circumstances end with you walking into a so-so bar, then accidentally causing some gigantic brute to…

Years ago I engaged in a long usenet discussion with another gentleman on immigration, life in the third world, etc. After some back-and-forths, the gentleman proposed a scenario: What would happen if the two of us were dropped, naked and with absolutely…

Interview with Andreas Streb, CEO VR Bayern-MitteBanks and financial institutions are not known as pioneers of Bitcoin adoption. But now they are coming —