The 2010s will perhaps be remembered for the decline of critical thinking and the ascension of dependency. Only to be fast tracked into the 2020s. There was a time, in the before, even among partisan political voices, when we could juggle reason with ideology. A regard for some forms of critical thinking, or the placating of objections raised by libertarians and the opponents of said policies or desires. There was a conversation. An understanding of the dangers of too much power, or control.

This was a time, when most institutions and governments pretended or did care about censorship, surveillance and the right to choice and opinions. The threat for most individuals was understood to come from groups or governments that suppressed and imposed control on them. However it was framed, it was understood that human beings had rights. Those rights were mostly regarded and understood to be sacred. It’s why Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning became such contentions figures. Heroes for many in public, and even media.

The West, at least for a time, stood as if it was a champion for liberty and individual rights. Into the 21^st century, it’s been the West that has become focused on big tech solutions for all things, and to homogenise society into a gentrified and allowable way of life. This has been achieved through bribery and ever so subtle sticks. But also, comfort.

Money has lost most of it’s value. It now exists as debt and fiat. Despite this, it’s now the most precious thing for humanity, that which all things are valued and done for. Everything in life requires money, and this means people will look the other way, decide their principles, morality and priority based on this belief. Government not only controls the printing press, it’s also the monopoly of the land. In the West, it’s generally the biggest employer, directly and through contracts and with welfare it supports and enables lifestyles from cradle to grave. People now regard their entitlements, that which comes at the expensive of others as being more important than rights. People also value income, and financial security above rights and any concept of principles.

In fact rights are fluid. Crisis and laws come about which either obviously or subtly shift what was once regarded as a right, into being denied. This can come via licensing, regulations or paywalls, to the outright prohibitions on things. The dangers, often imagined, or extreme in example are all that’s needed to stir up the mob. The professionals who work for the State, will enforce all and everything they are paid to.

There is also social credit. The death of critical thinking means that less people are capable of analysing a situation or concept without an emotional reaction. A reaction that generally reduces abstracts into soundbytes or simplified parameters. Instead of analysing or understanding laterally, depth of perspectives or wider implications the responses to all things generally revert to, more funding, ie more tax or debt money, another law or regulation to ban and prevent a thing. In short, the common response is the appeal to authority.

Anyone who challenges or questions a law, or attempts to publicly explore an abstract or decision are set upon by an emotional mob who only use slurs or argue from positions of feelings. Words such as “racist”, “Nazi”, “Fascist”, “Pedophile” and so on are thrown around with reckless abandon in place of any nuanced discourse. These words are used with such abandon, that the value of them is ruined. And, should anyone attempt to have a conversation publicly this is can be considered as ‘radical’ and thus dangerous.

Even those who wear the shirts of punk bands and cosplay as left wing, from the comfort of their corporate garnered lifestyles use the term, ‘radical’ as a slur. Somehow free speech, has become a ‘fascist’ or at the very least, ‘alt right’, red flag. For the left to reject free speech is an indictment of all things, once valued by the champions of left wing ideologies. The real, left.

Which brings us to the usage of ‘right wing’ as a slur among allowable argument points. As one who despises all forms of coercion, political or otherwise, I find it fascinating that politics has become so entrenched into one faction, the other side is now seen as pariah and viewed as an extreme danger. Yet, the commonality of both wings of government are rather similar. And, they are attached to the same beast. The monopoly of control. Whether a political regime or administration swings left or right, usually means little to most of the employees of that beast.

Big tech, technology in general was a promise for freedom. It turned out a lie. The more efficient a thing becomes, the more humanity uses it. Or, abuses. There is never enough. The compulsion to want more, to control nature, to organise, order and contain and force all things in life, is a deep routed need for many human beings. It’s not enough for a person to have a different opinion or way of life, they must be shamed, or coerced to be like everyone else. The frontiers are gone, it turns out Manifest Destiny is welfare, government jobs, corporations, AI slop and more data centres. Though, you can order from Temu or Amazon more Labubu’s. When that trend is done, and they are to buried in landfill above the fidget spinner, shopkins and beanie baby you can find another thing to spend debt on.

It’s a curious thing, we can watch in real time babies blown to pieces and gatekeeper established adults will claim antisemitic for any condemning the murder. Boats blown to pieces in international waters, assassination of unknown strangers based on assumptions by government which bases it’s legitimacy on the rule of law and concepts of due process. We see social media creatures gain prominent platforms and granted serious consideration by claiming that women should be subservient to men. We live in an age of endless moralist drives to ban media or censor it, either in the ongoing kidification of society, to protect children, even if they are not the intended audience or, under the guise of religious puritanism. To be supported by emotional appeals to authority, or bots. Those who criticise are stuck, the alternative, is to again, appeal to authority in a tug of war of begging the establishment.

The human body, your body is a domain which does not belong to you. Your access to medicine, food and how or what you do with it is decided and determined by professionals who make decisions based on cookiecut assumptions, metrics, regulatory determinations, greedy self interest and for insurance purposes. You are denied agency, because many want a public health state, the monopoly to guide, guard and control their body. It means everyone one of us are denied choice and options. Our bodies are controlled beneath the guise of, ‘common good’. To challenges this, or question the wisdom of any decisions, let alone the right of government and experts to know with a godlike omnipotence what is best for all or any, is considered to be conspiratorial. Reduced to an anti-social slur.

If not for what we ingest into the body, or do with or to it. That after all, is a cost to the public health system. Or Insurers. Therefore the collective decides on your behalf. As for your mental consumption, that is also to be regarded. If a thing, words, images or ideas may trigger or offend some, therefore it can be considered dangerous and hateful. To be offended, to offend and to challenges was once art and for literature. The indulgences of expression and philosophy. In the modern age of infinite diagnosis and ‘mental health crisis’s’, anything challenging and outside the normative parameters of mob think, or whatever satisfies intelligentsia, corporate or otherwise is an affront and can be censored, modified, redacted and removed from all existence. May I have permission to get that surgery, try that medication, to have the supplement? I will pay for it myself. “Denied!”

We have reached a fascinating cultural point, the meaning of media and properties from the middle to late twentieth century have now been modified and adapted to sooth a child like need for vapid spectacle and, to satiate the ever important appeal to authority. The once vaunted anti-establishment thinking, radicalism of the past is now avoided or down played as dangerous. Words, thoughts. Dangerous.

The decline of critical thinking is further diminished by the endless streams of slop fed before the eyes of those who have no time for anything other than social media, gaming and streaming shows. Enter, AI. Soon it will be a corporate or government job to merely prompt software. To request it write emails, generate forms, and the likes so that other agentic AI may read and respond. Perhaps a UBI already in place, or just another stage of senseless administration and ‘just because’ layers which human governance seems fixated with. To prompt an AI, so that it may brow beat humans on and bots alike on ‘saving the planet’, from within air-conditioned offices, while the data centres required chew up more power than ever needed for all of prior human history. The pollution is exported overseas, so you can feel good about it. They suffer, the poison is theirs, import the tech and junk. Feel good about it, net zero, renewables, whatever the lie. In Africa, Bangladesh is where they get to die. But YOU get to fill good, when you recycle and they take the rubbish. Mountains of Western trash towers in poor nations, carbon colonialism, pollution imperialism, as it was and ever shall be.

The obsession with software that only spies, or is pointless, leading to all appliances into becoming devices. More rare Earth dragged from the ground, with lengthy half lives, toxic and exhaustive mining, logistic lines that span the planet to manufacture so that a fridge may tell you, “the milks expired.” The human nose so mutated into redundancy we further become a French Bulldog of a species. Choice is one thing, in time this, and all things digital and with an interface and software that controls, spies and catalogues will be mandatory. It’s the march to the inevitable. The digital ID, the chip in the body, to be scanned, a QR code for each one of us, all dystopian and cyberpunk fears. Yet, here we are ever slowly sleep walking, or running in this direction. If we are all dependent, our religion is debt and adherence to the collective, we must do what is right, that’s to comply.

Why are we here?

Comfort, dependency. Cowardice. The indignity of belief in authority above all else. The the powerful, political or billionaires alike embraced to steer all of humanity into a betterplace, TM. Utopia..You can subscribe to it, not that you will have a choice.

The ancients once believed in Gods. The planet was governed by super beings, each with their own quirks and interests. Humanity has again discovered the gods. With mythologies and religious zealotry, desire for reward and vengeful retribution, these gods are both humans of wealth and political fiat, and the sacred institutions. The monopoly of state and too big to fails. The world exists for them. Just as humans once sacrificed, worshipped and prayed in the many temples of the past, you do so today. Your reward, access to debt, fiat, slithers of on controlled comfort, choice is dangerous. The sea of chaos is forbidden.

Joni Mitchell once said, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Parking lots, means “jobs” and “progress”. So, that’s all that matters, the gods hate Luddites, freedom, or anything for that matter which denies them control and power. And you, you love them for it. Because that lil French Bulldog has no choice now, but to sit on the lap, and live from vet visit to vet visit.

What happens when the language of “protecting the homeland” is used to sell a new regime change next door? We sit down with Kelley Vlahos to map the quiet return of neoconservative logic through a Venezuela push that’s packaged for a nationalist audience. The pitch is simple and potent: cartels, chaos, and a dictator at our doorstep. The implications are anything but simple. From asymmetric risks and migration shocks to the legal fog around authorizations, we trace how a narrow narrative can lock in a broad escalatory path.

Behind the scenes, personnel is policy. Kelley breaks down how Marco Rubio’s dual grip on State and the NSC, with backing from key advisors, is steering decisions while restraint voices get sidelined. That power shift collides with a Right already strained by Gaza and Ukraine, where “America First” voters see mission creep rather than clear interests. If Venezuela becomes the next front, we explore whether the movement fractures into a real civil war over foreign policy—and what that means for 2028 and beyond.

Then we follow the money and the metal. A deep dive into missile economics exposes a harsh constraint: U.S. interceptors cost multiples of Russian equivalents, stockpiles are thin, and production timelines are slow. After Ukraine, Red Sea intercepts, and Israel’s defense needs, the idea of adding Venezuela to a global posture looks like wishful thinking. Strategy cannot outrun logistics. We lay out what a sober path would require: honest objectives, congressional oversight, a rebuilt industrial base, and a tighter definition of vital interests.

If you value clear-eyed foreign policy and real debate over slogans, hit follow, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review with your take on Venezuela: deterrence, diplomacy, or something else?

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Over the years I have come across plenty of books that were destined for landfill. Whether through the various work places I had been, the charities which moved individuals from independence to “assisted” living and then the charity shops places themselves which can’t afford the bin fees to dump the excess they receive. Among these books, I have come across notes and journals. Small increments of intimate writing, sketches from a human past long forgotten but for these ink spots on paper, they remain as remnants that once mattered.

I had the intention of writing something cynical or even dreary, instead I found in the handwriting of those now long dead, some thoughts that seemed important enough to type up. From the minds of those who in their lives, a century or decades ago had a future ahead of them, reflected and observed, or even lashed out at a world around them.

Perhaps, this is a follow up to the meandering prose The Inner Light, or maybe inside of these words is an illuminating energy for any who care to read or ruminate upon. As we as a species once did.

In a diary, I found at a woman’s house who had passed away, she was in her late eighties, her family wanted, “everything thrown away,” so accordingly her life’s possessions reduced to landfill and the precious real estate she had lived in, the priority for the living, those who knew her and those who professionally gain from such occurrences. I salvaged what I could, to donate, or even keep. There is a tragic inhumanity to discarding photos, and notebooks like this. Physical media, technology once impressive now reduced to, meh, thrown away. The technology most often to be discarded, the book, especially those handwritten by regular people. A person like Mary and her diary.

Dated 1962, Mary wrote, “the birds have the idea to fly far and wide. They don’t see boundaries or care for language. They fly, high and wide. They visit where they please. It’s for us, mankind, to bury them inside cages. Imagine that, a creature capable of freedom, to clip their wings and cage them so we may watch them, make them sing for us. Imagine that.”

Imagine that. It’s with eerie camaraderie of thought that I reflect upon a piece, I wrote almost a decade ago which carries similar observance. Mary added further down the page, “I clipped my wings, or had them clipped for me. Who knows any more?”

She wrote in lovely handwriting in 1967, “I see they have sent more young men to another country to fight a war. I wonder what the gain would be. To stop communism? That’s what they claim. I wonder if they send warriors to fight the Viet-Namese over there so the politicians and powerful remain safe here. It seems pointless.”

And from 1968, “I have stopped believing in love. I must hear it in every song lyric. I don’t care for it. I will not have it. I have loved twice. Alistair and Nigel. Both loved me, I them. Alistair and I were young. Nigel, he should have known better. He picked a career over our love, now he travels the world and I stay here, lost and heartbroken. It’s what a man must do I am told. And, what a woman must wonder, hope for his safety and remain locked at home in blue tears? I will not have love spoken to me again.”

Many books have in them inscribed on the side of pages in tiny hand writing notes and thoughts to accompany the prose. One such book, a Penguin edition of The Essential James Joyce, Devesh had written his name in the early pages, along with the date 1995. I am assuming it was around that time when he wrote his notes.

“Why must he select words so ugly? He for a moment can write with elegance and superior texture and now he must be ever so dreadful.”

A few pages later, he wrote, “I wept.”

Among a pile of family bibles dating back to the late nineteenth century, I found a note book dated 1933 with glorious penship. The author, I am assuming a woman by the name of Bea. Much of the writing is on Christ and the human relationship with God. It is a selection of biblical quotes and additional thoughts relating to them. Beyond, I found a gentle sentence, “if I could find it in my heart to love my brother as much as I do God, then I would be a better sister.”

The following page she had written, “the measure of a man is in his character. Not his words. The measure of mankind is in the wisdom it finds from words.”

Another lady whose home had been reduced to a house for sale, had a library full of mystery and crime fiction. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and vintage Dorothy L Sayers books. Alongside a row of books, she had a pile of notebooks filled in her handwritting, picking through clues and her own thoughts. Adding dates and page numbers, accordingly. Attempting to solve the crimes along with the author, page by page and sentence by sentence. At the end of one page full of notes she had written, “it’s never the most obvious lie, only the most ambitious truth told over and over again.”

Other journals and notebooks were less profound, slight monuments to the mundane of life. Bills to be paid, shopping lists, items to be bought. Others are notes on income, accounting for a household. What may seem ever modest in today’s inflated world, was dear and went far in a time before easy credit and debt dependency. In one note book payments and incoming money written light, along with slashing sentence written by a heavy hand, “You are a failure!”

And near the end of one such notebook, “Kill yourself, no one will miss you.” Many of the books, were from suicides. I am uncertain as to whether this one was. They all remain clumped together, thrown and discarded. Unimportant pages according to the living. Landfill.

When Bradbury imagined his fireman who burned books. The symbolism was dystopian and obvious. We live in a world now of proud illiteracy, it’s not just that books are seen as a hindrance in their physical form. Even online, they are things not to be read, unless they are trending, and forgive me, light escapism. In the many piles, I was unable to rescue, re-home. Were countless thoughts and whispers written in ink along with the printed words telling stories, revealing knowledge and recording history. All to be buried beneath dirt and rubbish.

Other books I have saved from landfill, to be pulped into cat litter. Feline toilets. An excess of books with no readership is one thing, a disdainful public above reading is an all together fascinating state of humanity. As the online content creators produce digital slop, artificial bots generating streams for the feed to be forgotten and many books what may reduced to memes and vapid quotes. There lies countless millions of words, wrapped in wisdom and experiences. Glimmers of alien and familiar viewpoints. many now lost to the edge of time.

In a page from a water soaked journal written by John, dated 1978, “I hope what comes in the next decade is a better world. A smarter age. To think soon it will be a new century, to call it the 21^st century. The time will be a bright future and wise, smart people every one well read and enlightened. Healthy in mind and body. No more wars and slavery when the people are secure with knowledge. The 21^st century.”

John also wrote, later on that year, “I love my wife. More than ever now that she is gone. Burying the woman you love is the hardest thing a man can do. I wish it was me and not her. I wish I took the cancer from her body. I hope in the coming years we learn to beat cancer and other diseases. I wish I had the answer and was a smarter man and a better one. I love you Carole with all of my soul. I wish I was a better man and husband for you. I am sorry. You deserved the promises I made. I failed you. I love you.”

Lost inside of pages, are human moments that are not fabricated for the frenzy of diminished attention spans. There are intimate moments, and triumphant ambitions. Language allows us to frame and understand things beyond the material, the present. The abstract, to spiritual and the elements beyond us.

I will end on one final entry, Jane, from perhaps 2005 wrote, “I was blessed with another grandchild. Five now. Tabitha is healthy and like her mother a little shit. I don’t have favourites, no mother should. If Tabitha grows to be a shit like her mother, I will have grey hairs. Too late, they are already grey!”