Trump and all the other Far Right leaders in the world today are no different than the "Messiahs" that always emerge in dying cultures. Patriarchal Conservatism is dying, not experiencing a revival.

You’re delirious from heat. You haven’t had a break from it in days. You haven’t slept. You can’t remember how much water you’ve drunk. Your clothes cling to your skin in a sweaty melange. You don’t know what is real and what is delusion. Tony Blair drops a long read.

Or municipalities & cities could just do what every other thriving community has done; own large parts of the land and properties and lease them at a % of the median household income to local residents. Oh no wait! This is the United States and the Constitution explicitly prevents self-governance.

There is another reason it's critical that Americans learn to observe our own culture with an Anthropologist's eye. Ideology is attractive to individuals that don't have a fully developed personal identity. That is why politics and religion are plagued by dysfunctional people. 1/

1/ A lot of the tech and finance class does not grasp how the modern economy is built. The frontier is narrow. The frontier is hyper-productive. Most of what people need to live runs on different logic altogether. The two are not in the same race. It's 2026. Not 1926.

1/ The Abundance movement says: clear the obstacles, deregulate, build, build, build prices and fall. Carney's cut to GST and HST on new homes is sold as that move. It is not. The math runs the other way. It's a tax cut on the buyer side dressed in Abundance clothes.

Politically, we are faced with an emerging crisis for structural reasons. The US political structure is extremely vulnerable to being captured by the Capital class. The Silicon Valley/Wall Street elite is not an actual elite but as a group, they are fully convinced that they are. 1/2

I want a tshirt that says Premium Shitposter™️

The Colbert Show was killed by the same old duo; Libertarianism and profit seeking corporations. Every functional democracy has a functional central government funded public access system that is protected by the Constitution from political interference.

This is why virtue signalling is good, actually, because things involved in virtue signalling are often mitzvot on their own. Signal away, baby

Listen to Black people. Most Americans are natural egalitarians, but the Founders were not. They built a Patrimonial Dominance Hierarchy codified in the Constitution. Our freedom hangs in the balance between organic democratic resistance and elite control over capital, law, and state power. 1/2

No better example of why we urgently need fundamental institutional reform; functional democracies do not embed the Department of Justice in the Executive. The Department of Justice must be part of the independent administrative state and shielded from political interference by the Constitution.

When I was a kid our grandmother would unplug the telephone at 6 pm. This was part of our ancient way of managing technology instead of technology managing us.

Dominance Hierarchies are being replaced by Trust Hierarchies. Social hierarchies based on patrimonial control are in a desperate fight with the emerging network age.

Charlie George

Herbert Chapman

Is an American flag made in Sweden not an American flag?

If you are scared of A. I. you are scared of humanity because A. I. is a mirror of human thought. A. I. must be carefully regulated but the real issue is maladaptive institutional structures that elevates antisocial individuals and produces division and conflict www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/o...

I want to know why millions of people cannot distinguish between knowledge and opinions?

The fake controversy about AOC says everything about self serving political consultants, and nothing about political power formation,

We must replace highly politicized and misleading Economics and PoliSci in public discussions and in public police decision making with knowledge based sciences.

Neoliberalism is the greatest market failure in the history of Capitalism

For those not familiar with London, Parliament square is a small green. Failing to fill it in your statement gathering is its own humiliation.

It says so much about the moment that influencers and politicians have enormous sway over public opinion. At no time in history has it been more important to base public policy and law on knowledge rather than opinion, yet non experts, driven by insatiable attention hunger, dominates the discourse.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson keep citing Austin as proof their housing theory works. The very data they're using shows it doesn't. It's so sad to see that the media just plays along with utter nonsense that is easily proven to be, not just plain wrong, but damaging to peoples' lives.

The charitable story elevates the learner, not the bigot. We are all ignorant but to insist that private provision of necessary public goods does not invariably produce systemic fraud whenever the goods' structural conditions foreclose market discipline, and that immigrants are the cause, is bigotry

We’re blocking all the debate me bro types

The reason that, even in the era of social media, there are relatively few if celebrity politicians, civil servants or academics or business leaders in Germany and Scandinavia, is that networked institutional structures do not produce cults of personality. So far fewer Krugman, Trump, Obama etc.

Britain was badly governed by the Tories under Thatcher. Just like the US was badly governed by the GOP under Reagan. The assumption that these periods represent good governance, reflects a deeply flawed concept of what adaptive institutional structures look like

The national structure that produces the misdiagnosis is the same structure that constrains the diagnostic capacity. The information is available. Bagehot wrote about the dignified and efficient parts of the constitution in 1867. Hennessy has been describing the hollowing for thirty years.

It's kind of wonderful and scary in a weird way that says so much about the moment we live in, that a Communist dictator has read and absorbed the most Western centric idea cooked up by a Harvard professor.

Bad government is a product of bad institutional design. It's hard for me to understand how articles like this one in the FT can see the light of day in the 21st century. It's as if knowledge of human behavior has not reached the shores of the British Isles.

Republicans: green energy is unreliable and Chinese solar panels are spying on us. Sweden: free or even negative electricity prices has become increasingly common due to public investments in green energy.

I love punk rock and shows like The Voice and American Idol. How does this make any sense?

The right model doesn't treat sentiment as a function of current macro conditions. It treats sentiment as a coalition-level affective output produced by an evolved cognitive architecture integrating multiple channels of input in a non-stationary information environment. Complexity ate social media

Surveys are not measurement instruments in the sense a thermometer is. They are cognitive-social interactions in which a question elicits a constructed response under specific conditions of attention, recall, mood, framing, and identity activation. 1/2

Which theory of sentiment is operative?

Diagnostic tests on historical frequency data assume that with enough cleaning, differencing, and structural-break detection, the underlying generating process becomes legible. But the generating process is itself adapting. No amount of diagnostic testing fixes the fundamental asymmetry.

Humans are cultural-biological organisms that adapt to selection environments. Selection environments include economic, political, technological, and social landscapes. Each generation of adaptation changes the selection environment for the next generation. Models that ignore this are useless.

Reality TV pitch: 5 quant economists with OLS and stats grad degrees, $1M each to trade. 5 sociologists with qualitative research training, $1M each. One year. Team with the largest balance sheet wins $10M.

"Non-stationary" is the ke here. OLS assumes stationarity; Granger & Newbold (1974) showed regression on non-stationary data produces spurious significant coefficients. Lucas (1976) extended the point to social processes under regime change. Standard stuff in market strategy design. 1/2

Psychology is under rated

1/ Recent inequality did narrow — wage compression at the bottom in 2021–24 was real. That's the correlation. It doesn't explain sentiment because sentiment isn't tracking current Gini. It's tracking 40 years of risk-shift: pensions, healthcare, housing, education-financing privatized since 1980.

In short; the problem is Neoliberalism, not immigration. Whether or not far right leaders understand this or not is irrelevant; they are defeated by liberal parties that stand on a platform of fully funded public options.

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Given the structure of the nation, Obama and Biden were, on all objective measures that matter to ordinary people, the most effective Presidents since FDR. Now we must build on that legacy by replacing the Democratic Party leadership with people that have a vision based on knowledge, not ideology.

Obama is right! The vast majority of Americans would immediately understand that they should vote for a candidate that promises to provide universal healthcare, education, housing, transportation, justice and a foreign policy of supporting people, not violent governments!

Property taxes and fiscal federalism are maladaptive and should be replaced with a modern tax and spend structure. It's as if we are living in the 18th century still! www.ft.com/content/181e...

Liberalism is not in retreat. Liberal political parties such as the Democratic Party in the US, are in retreat. These are two very different things.

The woman scanning the room for a socially well-adjusted man with a fully developed identity is not being unrealistic in her hope. She is being unrealistic about the supply, because the institutional and cultural conditions that reliably produced such men have been mostly destroyed in America.