July 20, 2026 (menalive.com)

By Jed Diamond

No one forgets the birth of their first child. For me the blessed event occurred on November 21, 1969. I had done my best to coach my wife through the Lamaze breathing techniques that we had learned in our birthing classes. It was now time for her to move to the delivery room to complete the birth process and welcome our newborn child into the world.

We were both ready for the final stage of the journey. The nurse turned to me with a smile saying,

“OK, Mr. Diamond, your job is done now. You can go to the waiting room and we’ll let you know when your child arrives.”

I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. On the one hand we had done this far together and I wanted to be with my wife for the birth. On the other, I was afraid I might freak out and pass out. I didn’t want to screw things up.

I kissed my wife and told her she would do fine. She attempted a smile but was overcome with the next contraction. As they wheeled her to the left towards the delivery room, I went the other direction. But as I started to go through the waiting room doors, something stopped me. I felt the calling of my soon-to-be born child saying,

“I don’t want a waiting room father. Your place is here with us.”

I turned around and walked back the other way and pushed through the doors into the delivery room. I didn’t ask permission and there was no question of my leaving, if asked. I didn’t care what the rules were, my child needed me, and I answered the call. It wasn’t long until our beautiful baby boy was born. As Jemal was handed to me, amid tears of relief and joy, I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully involved with their children throughout their lives.

After we brought him home from the hospital, I took three weeks off from work to spend time being the supportive parent for my wife and continue bonding with our son. The event of Jemal’s birth and the aftermath changed my life forever. A year after Jemal’s birth, my wife announced that she needed a break from 24/7 child rearing. She acknowledged that I was a great help, but she needed a break from being the primary caregiver. A girlfriend had invited her to go on a road trip, maybe for a few weeks, and asked if I could take a few weeks off from work again and be with Jemal.

I quickly agreed, wanting to be a good, new-age, liberated father. But inside I was terrified. It was one thing to be the supportive parent knowing that I had the mother of our child to step in at any time. I believed that mothers had an inherent understanding of babies and knew what to do, a special something I felt men lacked. I felt I had learned a lot about taking care of our baby boy, but what did I know really. I was just a man. What would I do if he needed something that I couldn’t give him? We didn’t have mothers in the area that could help us out, but my wife assured me I could call her anytime if I needed advice.

The first few days were scary, but Jemal and I figured things out together. I found I had abilities I didn’t know I had. We played together, father and son. I fed him, changed his diapers, slept with one ear open listening to any cries in the night. My wife phoned a few times and I told her honestly that things were going fine. We both missed her, but father and son were surviving and thriving.

We did more than survive and thrive. We formed a bond together that has lasted through time. We’re connected in a way that most fathers and sons are not. I feel confident as a father and as a man that I never imagined I would feel.

Jemal will be fifty-six in November. My wife and I now have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. I continue to love and learn. I recently heard about a new book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by world renowned evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. It helped me understand my own experiences as a father and the importance of fathers throughout evolutionary history.

I recently had the good fortune of interviewing Dr. Hrdy, which you can watch here. After a full career studying the lives of mothers and writing iconic books including The Woman That Never Evolved, Mother Nature, she began to recognize the importance of fathering that had been mostly neglected by experts in Darwinian science and evolutionary psychology.

“It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things,” says Dr. Hrdy. “Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring.”

Yet experiences Dr. Hrdy was having in her own family watched men nurture babies, led her explore the evolutionary roots of male nurture of young babies and has helped us recognize a much more expanded reality of what it means to be a man. What she discovered will forever change our views of manhood.

I learned this more than fifty years ago when Jemal was born. More and more men have experienced this expanded reality.

“Men caring for babies undergo the same neurological transformations, the same increase in prolactin levels and oxytocin-induced sensual pleasure as mothers do,”

says Dr. Hrdy. I didn’t understand the biological changes I went through at the time, but that was certainly my experience as I spent significant time physically in touch with Jemal.

“If their brains undergo shape-shifting similar to that in mothers, wouldn’t men’s psychological preferences change as well?” asks Dr. Hrdy. “Might men’s priorities come to more nearly resemble the more prosocial ones mothers are assumed to have? Might such men also be more likely to opt for safer and more sustainable courses of action?”

I would take it another step further. Would men with this kind of changed brains, brains that are not only tuned to children, but to humans and other living things, be the kind of men who can join with women to create a healthier, more sustainable world? It doesn’t take experts to alert us to the reality that humanity is out of balance with the laws of nature and that we need to change our ways if we are going to survive and thrive as a species.

Thomas Berry was a priest, a “geologian,” and a historian of religions. He spoke eloquently to our connection to the Earth and the consequences of our failure to remember we are one member in the community of life.

“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”

At a time when mothers are feeling overwhelmed by trying to take care of infants and many are seeking child care from strangers or even looking to AI robots to raise our children, the answer may be to support more hands-on, and hearts-connected fathers and their babies. What do you think?

You can learn more about Dr. Hrdy and her work by visiting her website. You can watch my in-depth interview with her here.

If you appreciate articles like these, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter here.

Best Wishes,

Jed Diamond

Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive

Masculinity

Pete Hegseth’s Crisis of Masculinity

July 27, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

The secretary of war’s obsession with testosterone reveals the anxieties he harbors about himself and the military he leads.

Nick Turse

July 25 2026 (TheIntercept.com)

On Wednesday at 11:07 p.m. ET, the president went on Truth Social to share an important piece of information with Americans. It wasn’t an update on the sinking U.S. economy, the failing forever war with Iran, a remembrance of the Americans recently killed in that conflict, rising gasoline prices, the more than 800 lawsuits against his administration, a cyclosporiasis outbreak, surging cases of measles, the problems with his Qatari-gifted Air Force One, or comment on any of the swirling crises that typify the day-to-day of Donald Trump’s America.

Instead, it was a retread of an Instagram post with a clip from an appearance of UFC CEO Dana White — who brought bloodsport to the White House lawn in June — on “The Pat McAfee Show.” It wasn’t, however, a clip from this week or this month or even about last month’s UFC Freedom 250 event. In fact, it wasn’t even from this year.

The headline on the post tells the story: “HOLY CRAP: Dana White says it best: TRUMP is the ‘ultimate American badass of all time.’”

White did actually say that — but he said it back in July 2024. This desperation for two-year-old adulation would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. But the so-called leader of the free world isn’t the only one obsessed with being seen as an American badass. Trump’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, is on a mission to make America’s fighting men (and women) more macho by any means necessary. Unsurprisingly, it’s fast becoming a problem for all Americans.

– Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

If you haven’t yet, sign up to receive TomDispatch in your inbox here.

The Low-T Issue

Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth has a problem with low testosterone. It’s left him suffering from what you might call an acute crisis of masculinity. And I’m pretty sure that he caught it from Teddy Roosevelt.

Bear with me. I’ll explain.

Last week, the Trump administration’s preening, strutting, wanna-be he-man announced a new mandatory annual screening for troops age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency. Troops under 30 can volunteer to be screened, and anyone with low hormone levels will have the option to receive testosterone replacement therapy.

“It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capability,” said Hegseth, by ensuring “you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight” on the “brutal and unrelenting” modern battlefield. Like all Hegseth initiatives, he linked it to “lethality” — now the animating feature of his life. He called topping off troops’ testosterone levels a “sacred duty.”

Anyone who has observed Hegseth for more than 15 seconds in the last 15 years could tell you the man is riddled with deep insecurities. His quest to fully transition the Defense Department to what he calls “The High-T Department of War” is just the latest manifestation of nagging anxieties about himself and the wheel-spinning, never-winning military he leads.

Poor Pete’s woes have been piling up since he headed off to college at Princeton, if not before. Hegseth acts like he was drafted against his will by the Ivy League and escaped it by joining the Army National Guard as an infantry officer in 2003. He fondly recalls guarding “Islamic assholes” at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, alongside “hard-working, God-fearing, America-loving middle-class men” whom he contrasts with “millionaires at Princeton,” a school he derides whenever he can.

Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt. This long love affair with TR has continued over the decades. Pete wrote a ridiculous 2016 book, “In the Arena,” based on the “timeless truths of Teddy Roosevelt’s iconic ‘Man in the Arena’ speech” from 1910. And he still references that speech to this day and routinely works Teddy into his public remarks whenever he can.

Last year, Hegseth wanted the Pentagon to cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America because, he believed, “the organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt” had strayed from their mission to “cultivate masculine values.” (He later bullied the Scouts into submission.) And just last month, he talked up TR to U.S. troops in Cuba — where Roosevelt fought during the Spanish-American War — using his hero as proof of America’s right to intervene “in the affairs of Latin American nations.”

No one more exemplified the anxieties of privileged men of his time than Teddy Roosevelt, who grew up in the swirl of post-Civil War America in which urbanization, industrialization, a new emphasis on “brainwork,” and new technologies led to a crippling novel condition dubbed neurasthenia: nervous exhaustion, or a deficiency of “nerve-force.” This affliction was “modern and originally American,” according to the then-most influential expert on the now-archaic medical diagnosis.

Rich, white Anglo-Saxon men like Teddy professed complete cultural, racial, and sexual superiority but grew extremely anxious it was being stolen from them. (Yes, you guessed it: Immigrants, radicals, and independent, unduly educated, or otherwise unruly “new” women were prime culprits.) Men were fast becoming feeble and feminized; only through manly endeavors like weightlifting, hiking, hunting, sports, horseback riding, and excursions into the wild could they counteract the debilitating effects of over-civilization. Roosevelt, for example, transformed himself from a frail, sickly weakling who was called a “sissy” by peers and “Jane-Dandy” by the press into a man’s man via boxing, shooting, wrestling, and travel out West, where he reinvented himself as a cowboy.

As Teddy Roosevelt’s Statue Falls, Let’s Remember How Truly Dark His History Was

The scholar Yeonsik Jung summed up the neurasthenic age nicely, writing: “Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men’s racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s.” These white American men had to win back, as another scholar put it, “the potency of their violent masculinity—their ability to out-savage the savage” on the American frontier before turning overseas to places like the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua. Roosevelt’s own expansionist imperialism and his campaign against “race suicide” were firmly rooted in this toxic ferment. When the United States initially failed to annex Hawaii after a group of missionaries and pineapple plantation interests took over and set up their own government in the 1890s, for example, Roosevelt called the reluctance “a crime against white civilization.”

The framed quote Hegseth stuffed into that Gitmo duffle, which he also took to the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are lines from “The Man in the Arena” speech:

Am I striving valiantly?

Is my face marred by dust and sweat and blood? Am I spending myself in a worthy cause?

Am I daring greatly?

Am I in the arena?

“Spending myself” is an intriguing phrase here that’s key to my diagnosis of Hegseth. I’m not a medical doctor, but long ago I studied the intersection of medicine and masculinity in the late 19th and early 20th century en route to my Ph.D. A great panic of the era surrounded what historians came to call the “spermatic economy,” the belief that a man’s semen was a finite reserve of vital energy — like money in a bank account — and “spending” this essential life force through masturbation or excessive sex would leave him depleted, leading to nervous exhaustion’s below-the-waist variant: sexual neurasthenia. (President Donald Trump, who espouses pseudoscientific claptrap about good and bad “genes” also reportedly believes humans are closed-loop systems that, like a battery, have a finite amount of energy.)

Such fin de siècle fears of debilitation led to “rejuvenation” cures like French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injecting himself and others with crushed guinea pig testicles — launching the field of “organotherapy” — and Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach’s surgical procedure, a partial vasectomy to restore vigor which found favor with patients from psychoanalysis founder and noted head case Sigmund Freud to William Butler Yeats, the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet. (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”)

Hegseth Is Pushing Testosterone. The VA Has Already Struggled With the Treatment.

Hegseth is heir to this utter nuttery — obsessed as it was with limits on semen spending and banking one’s virility. His hysteria over the military becoming “effeminate” has led him to conclude that those who wish to “master the profession of arms” must have their testosterone tanks topped off. And he claims, without evidence, that pumping troops full of this hormone — which people of every sex and gender produce — will improve “combat readiness.” Hegseth also thinks his new policy will make troops “strong, resilient and capable.”

But while testosterone is tied to muscle mass, it isn’t linked with actual strength. A 2019 study found that men who received injected testosterone while engaged in intense exercise and a restricted diet — meant to mimic “strenuous military operations” — did not see gains in strength or endurance; a 2022 follow-up also found no increase in physical performance. Moreover, supplementing testosterone actually signals the body to shut down its own natural production, which can shrink the testicles and reduce one’s sperm count. (Paging Dr. Steinach!)

Hegseth believes you can measure manhood by testing testosterone, the same way he believes you can kill your way to victory on the battlefield.

Hegseth appears to believe more is better, advocating for a “high T” fighting force. But high levels of testosterone — which is currently classified as a controlled substance with potential for abuse — can lead to acne, balding, breast tissue growth, impaired ability of the heart to pump blood, infertility, erectile dysfunction, and increased risk of death.

Of course, it’s hard to say what’s normal if you’re testing millions of healthy people. Testosterone levels can change depending on when a patient is tested, whether they have recently eaten, exercised heavily, or are sick, among other factors, Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine, recently told The Intercept. For example, in about a third of men whose testosterone initially tests low, a second test produces a normal result. Tests also have high inter-lab variability. On that front, doctors usually assess testosterone levels only when symptoms of low T appear, and less than 6 percent of men between 30 and 79 actually have a deficiency.

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Last week, a group of senators called out Hegseth for his bizarre obsession with troops’ testosterone, noting his department “provided no evidence that this sweeping new policy will improve force readiness or health, nor has it explained the scientific basis, costs, or risks associated with implementing it across the force.” They also pointed to “recent repeated efforts to redefine military culture around an exaggerated conception of masculinity.”

Women in the Army Are More Likely to Be Killed by Fellow Soldiers Than Enemy Combatants

Exaggerated masculinity is an apt description for Hegseth. In his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors,” he bemoaned a plot to manufacture “soft men, and a weak military.” He describes an effort to make the armed forces “fatter,” “slower,” and “effeminate” by those “obsessed” with “neutering our military,” and delves into the dangers posed by “Pentagon pussies.”

After 18 months of crackpot policies and puerile posturing at the helm of the War Department, Hegseth’s hysteria has only grown. Like Roosevelt, Hegseth is forever struggling to display his manhood through physical exertion — posting videos of himself engaging in humiliating fitness challenges. Similarly, he’s been propping up America’s long-sagging martial prowess by beating up on the likes of Venezuela, attacking elementary school kids in Iran, blowing up unarmed boats packed with civilians in the Caribbean Sea, and threatening tiny Cuba, where his hero Teddy won fame for a Spanish-American War charge up San Juan Hill.

“The Trillion Dollar War Machine,” by William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman Available on Bookshop.org

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was Roosevelt’s foreign policy prescription. But from the war against the Houthis last year to the war on Iran today, Hegseth has found that his stick just doesn’t measure up. The resulting insecurity has led the emasculated War secretary to fire women and Black men from top leadership positions, block the promotion of women military officers, banish transgender service members, and denounce “fat generals and admirals” and “females” whom he believes “can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” He has now added low-T troops to the list of scapegoats for his department’s underperformance, instead of examining his failings as a leader.

Hegseth believes you can measure manhood by testing testosterone, the same way he believes you can kill your way to victory on the battlefield. It’s part of a mélange of flaccid fallacies and fantasies that seem to dominate the worldview of a man who paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of raping her, whose former sister-in-law accused him of “abusive” behavior toward his second wife, and whose own mother once called out the fact that he “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” And as America’s wars go south, Hegseth has become ever more unhinged and his public tantrums more pronounced. “You have Trump derangement syndrome!” he snapped at Michigan Sen. Gary Peters this week, after failing to admit earlier claims about victory in the Iran war were premature.

Hegseth is exactly where he wants to be — “in the arena” — even though it’s abundantly clear his crisis of masculinity is becoming a catastrophe for his department, the rest of America, and great swaths of the globe, from the Caribbean to Iran. All the testosterone in the world isn’t going to win America’s wars, achieve Hegseth’s dream of turning “soft men” hard, or transform “Pentagon pussies” into something more in line with his fantasies, much less cure the crushing insecurities swirling in the brain of America’s fragile war secretary and the deep deficiency that has long plagued him.

IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

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Contact the author:

Nick Turse nick.turse@theintercept.com @nickturseon X

Society

Meditations On Moloch

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Scott Alexander (slatestarcodex.com)

Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes.

A lot of the commentators say Moloch represents capitalism. This is definitely a piece of it, even a big piece. But it doesn’t quite fit. Capitalism, whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen? Capitalism in whom I am a consciousness without a body? Capitalism, therefore granite cocks?

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

Bostrom makes an offhanded reference of the possibility of a dictatorless dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates but which nevertheless endures unconquered. It’s easy enough to imagine such a state. Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced.

So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on. Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

And okay, this example is kind of contrived. So let’s run through – let’s say ten – real world examples of similar multipolar traps to really hammer in how important this is.

1. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, as played by two very dumb libertarians who keep ending up on defect-defect. There’s a much better outcome available if they could figure out the coordination, but coordination is hard. From a god’s-eye-view, we can agree that cooperate-cooperate is a better outcome than defect-defect, but neither prisoner within the system can make it happen.

2. Dollar auctions. I wrote about this and even more convoluted versions of the same principle in Game Theory As A Dark Art. Using some weird auction rules, you can take advantage of poor coordination to make someone pay $10 for a one dollar bill. From a god’s-eye-view, clearly people should not pay $10 for a on-er. From within the system, each individual step taken might be rational.

(Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!)

3. The fish farming story from my Non-Libertarian FAQ 2.0:

As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like this is the core of my objection to libertarianism, and that Non-Libertarian FAQ 3.0 will just be this one example copy-pasted two hundred times. From a god’s-eye-view, we can say that polluting the lake leads to bad consequences. From within the system, no individual can prevent the lake from being polluted, and buying a filter might not be such a good idea.

4. The Malthusian trap, at least at its extremely pure theoretical limits. Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.

For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.

5. Capitalism. Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

(I’m not really sure how widely people appreciate the value of analogizing capitalism to evolution. Fit companies – defined as those that make the customer want to buy from them – survive, expand, and inspire future efforts, and unfit companies – defined as those no one wants to buy from – go bankrupt and die out along with their company DNA. The reasons Nature is red and tooth and claw are the same reasons the market is ruthless and exploitative)

From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system, there’s no way to enact it.

(Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose blood is running money!)

6. The Two-Income Trap, as recently discussed on this blog. It theorized that sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto.

From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help win their competition for nice houses, then everyone will get exactly as nice a house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.

(Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs!)

7. Agriculture. Jared Diamond calls it the worst mistake in human history. Whether or not it was a mistake, it wasn’t an accident – agricultural civilizations simply outcompeted nomadic ones, inevitable and irresistably. Classic Malthusian trap. Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a state of sufficiently intense competition between peoples, in which agriculture with all its disease and oppression and pestilence was the more competitive option, everyone will end up agriculturalists or go the way of the Comanche Indians.

From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to see everyone should keep the more enjoyable option and stay hunter-gatherers. From within the system, each individual tribe only faces the choice of going agricultural or inevitably dying.

8. Arms races. Large countries can spend anywhere from 5% to 30% of their budget on defense. In the absence of war – a condition which has mostly held for the past fifty years – all this does is sap money away from infrastructure, health, education, or economic growth. But any country that fails to spend enough money on defense risks being invaded by a neighboring country that did. Therefore, almost all countries try to spend some money on defense.

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is world peace and no country having an army at all. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that, so their best option is to keep on throwing their money into missiles that lie in silos unused.

(Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!)

9. Cancer. The human body is supposed to be made up of cells living harmoniously and pooling their resources for the greater good of the organism. If a cell defects from this equilibrium by investing its resources into copying itself, it and its descendants will flourish, eventually outcompeting all the other cells and taking over the body – at which point it dies. Or the situation may repeat, with certain cancer cells defecting against the rest of the tumor, thus slowing down its growth and causing the tumor to stagnate.

From a god’s-eye-view, the best solution is all cells cooperating so that they don’t all die. From within the system, cancerous cells will proliferate and outcompete the other – so that only the existence of the immune system keeps the natural incentive to turn cancerous in check.

10. The “race to the bottom” describes a political situation where some jurisdictions lure businesses by promising lower taxes and fewer regulations. The end result is that either everyone optimizes for competitiveness – by having minimal tax rates and regulations – or they lose all of their business, revenue, and jobs to people who did (at which point they are pushed out and replaced by a government who will be more compliant).

But even though the last one has stolen the name, all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

Before we go on, there’s a slightly different form of multi-agent trap worth investigating. In this one, the competition is kept at bay by some outside force – usually social stigma. As a result, there’s not actually a race to the bottom – the system can continue functioning at a relatively high level – but it’s impossible to optimize and resources are consistently thrown away for no reason. Lest you get exhausted before we even begin, I’ll limit myself to four examples here.

11. Education. In my essay on reactionary philosophy, I talk about my frustration with education reform:

People ask why we can’t reform the education system. But right now students’ incentive is to go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them – whether or not they learn anything. Employers’ incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so that they can defend their decision to their boss if it goes wrong – whether or not the college provides value added. And colleges’ incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige, as measured in US News and World Report rankings – whether or not it helps students. Does this lead to huge waste and poor education? Yes. Could the Education God notice this and make some Education Decrees that lead to a vastly more efficient system? Easily! But since there’s no Education God everybody is just going to follow their own incentives, which are only partly correlated with education or efficiency.

From a god’s eye view, it’s easy to say things like “Students should only go to college if they think they will get something out of it, and employers should hire applicants based on their competence and not on what college they went to”. From within the system, everyone’s already following their own incentives correctly, so unless the incentives change the system won’t either.

12. Science. Same essay:

The modern research community knows they aren’t producing the best science they could be. There’s lots of publication bias, statistics are done in a confusing and misleading way out of sheer inertia, and replications often happen very late or not at all. And sometimes someone will say something like “I can’t believe people are too dumb to fix Science. All we would have to do is require early registration of studies to avoid publication bias, turn this new and powerful statistical technique into the new standard, and accord higher status to scientists who do replication experiments. It would be really simple and it would vastly increase scientific progress. I must just be smarter than all existing scientists, since I’m able to think of this and they aren’t.”

And yeah. That would work for the Science God. He could just make a Science Decree that everyone has to use the right statistics, and make another Science Decree that everyone must accord replications higher status.

But things that work from a god’s-eye view don’t work from within the system. No individual scientist has an incentive to unilaterally switch to the new statistical technique for her own research, since it would make her research less likely to produce earth-shattering results and since it would just confuse all the other scientists. They just have an incentive to want everybody else to do it, at which point they would follow along. And no individual journal has an incentive to unilaterally switch to early registration and publishing negative results, since it would just mean their results are less interesting than that other journal who only publishes ground-breaking discoveries. From within the system, everyone is following their own incentives and will continue to do so.

13. Government corruption. I don’t know of anyone who really thinks, in a principled way, that corporate welfare is a good idea. But the government still manages to spend somewhere around (depending on how you calculate it) $100 billion dollars a year on it – which for example is three times the amount they spend on health care for the needy. Everyone familiar with the problem has come up with the same easy solution: stop giving so much corporate welfare. Why doesn’t it happen?

Government are competing against one another to get elected or promoted. And suppose part of optimizing for electability is optimizing campaign donations from corporations – or maybe it isn’t, but officials think it is. Officials who try to mess with corporate welfare may lose the support of corporations and be outcompeted by officials who promise to keep it intact.

So although from a god’s-eye-view everyone knows that eliminating corporate welfare is the best solution, each individual official’s personal incentives push her to maintain it.

14. Congress. Only 9% of Americans like it, suggesting a lower approval rating than cockroaches, head lice, or traffic jams. However, 62% of people who know who their own Congressional representative is approve of them. In theory, it should be really hard to have a democratically elected body that maintains a 9% approval rating for more than one election cycle. In practice, every representative’s incentive is to appeal to his or her constituency while throwing the rest of the country under the bus – something at which they apparently succeed.

From a god’s-eye-view, every Congressperson ought to think only of the good of the nation. From within the system, you do what gets you elected.

II.

A basic principle unites all of the multipolar traps above. In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

In a sufficiently intense competition (1-10), everyone who doesn’t throw all their values under the bus dies out – think of the poor rats who wouldn’t stop making art. This is the infamous Malthusian trap, where everyone is reduced to “subsistence”.

In an insufficiently intense competition (11-14), all we see is a perverse failure to optimize – consider the journals which can’t switch to more reliable science, or the legislators who can’t get their act together and eliminate corporate welfare. It may not reduce people to subsistence, but there is a weird sense in which it takes away their free will.

Every two-bit author and philosopher has to write their own utopia. Most of them are legitimately pretty nice. In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that two utopias that are polar opposites both sound better than our own world.

It’s kind of embarrassing that random nobodies can think up states of affairs better than the one we actually live in. And in fact most of them can’t. A lot of utopias sweep the hard problems under the rug, or would fall apart in ten minutes if actually implemented.

But let me suggest a couple of “utopias” that don’t have this problem.

– The utopia where instead of the government paying lots of corporate welfare, the government doesn’t pay lots of corporate welfare.

– The utopia where every country’s military is 50% smaller than it is today, and the savings go into infrastructure spending.

– The utopia where all hospitals use the same electronic medical record system, or at least medical record systems that can talk to each other, so that doctors can look up what the doctor you saw last week in a different hospital decided instead of running all the same tests over again for $5000.

I don’t think there are too many people who oppose any of these utopias. If they’re not happening, it’s not because people don’t support them. It certainly isn’t because nobody’s thought of them, since I just thought of them right now and I don’t expect my “discovery” to be hailed as particularly novel or change the world.

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.

But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not designed for beauty or navigation, but rather an artifact of randomly determined terrain, so institutions will not be designed for prosperity or justice, but rather an artifact of randomly determined initial conditions.

Just as people can level terrain and build canals, so people can alter the incentive landscape in order to build better institutions. But they can only do so when they are incentivized to do so, which is not always. As a result, some pretty wild tributaries and rapids form in some very strange places.

I will now jump from boring game theory stuff to what might be the closest thing to a mystical experience I’ve ever had.

Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:

It is glorious that we can create something like this.

It is shameful that we did.

Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?

And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.

Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”

Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.

So we have all this amazing technological and cognitive energy, the brilliance of the human species, wasted on reciting the lines written by poorly evolved cellular receptors and blind economics, like gods being ordered around by a moron.

Some people have mystical experiences and see God. There in Las Vegas, I saw Moloch.

(Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!

Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch, whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations!)

…granite cocks!

III.

The Apocrypha Discordia says:

Time flows like a river. Which is to say, downhill. We can tell this because everything is going downhill rapidly. It would seem prudent to be somewhere else when we reach the sea.

Let’s take this random gag 100% literally and see where it leads us.

We just analogized the flow of incentives to the flow of a river. The downhill trajectory is appropriate: the traps happen when you find an opportunity to trade off a useful value for greater competitiveness. Once everyone has it, the greater competitiveness brings you no joy – but the value is lost forever. Therefore, each step of the Poor Coordination Polka makes your life worse.

But not only have we not yet reached the sea, but we also seem to move uphill surprisingly often. Why do things not degenerate more and more until we are back at subsistence level? I can think of three bad reasons – excess resources, physical limitations, and utility maximization – plus one good reason – coordination.

1. Excess resources. The ocean depths are a horrible place with little light, few resources, and various horrible organisms dedicated to eating or parasitizing one another. But every so often, a whale carcass falls to the bottom of the sea. More food than the organisms that find it could ever possibly want. There’s a brief period of miraculous plenty, while the couple of creatures that first encounter the whale feed like kings. Eventually more animals discover the carcass, the faster-breeding animals in the carcass multiply, the whale is gradually consumed, and everyone sighs and goes back to living in a Malthusian death-trap.

(Slate Star Codex: Your source for macabre whale metaphors since June 2014)

It’s as if a group of those rats who had abandoned art and turned to cannibalism suddenly was blown away to a new empty island with a much higher carrying capacity, where they would once again have the breathing room to live in peace and create artistic masterpieces.

This is an age of whalefall, an age of excess carrying capacity, an age when we suddenly find ourselves with a thousand-mile head start on Malthus. As Hanson puts it, this is the dream time.

As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all, we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.

2. Physical limitations. Imagine a profit-maximizing slavemaster who decided to cut costs by not feeding his slaves or letting them sleep. He would soon find that his slaves’ productivity dropped off drastically, and that no amount of whipping them could restore it. Eventually after testing numerous strategies, he might find his slaves got the most work done when they were well-fed and well-rested and had at least a little bit of time to relax. Not because the slaves were voluntarily withholding their labor – we assume the fear of punishment is enough to make them work as hard as they can – but because the body has certain physical limitations that limit how mean you can get away with being. Thus, the “race to the bottom” stops somewhere short of the actual ethical bottom, when the physical limits are run into.

John Moes, a historian of slavery, goes further and writes about how the slavery we are most familiar with – that of the antebellum South – is a historical aberration and probably economically inefficient. In most past forms of slavery – especially those of the ancient world – it was common for slaves to be paid wages, treated well, and often given their freedom.

He argues that this was the result of rational economic calculation. You can incentivize slaves through the carrot or the stick, and the stick isn’t very good. You can’t watch slaves all the time, and it’s really hard to tell whether a slave is slacking off or not (or even whether, given a little more whipping, he might be able to work even harder). If you want your slaves to do anything more complicated than pick cotton, you run into some serious monitoring problems – how do you profit from an enslaved philosopher? Whip him really hard until he elucidates a theory of The Good that you can sell books about?

The ancient solution to the problem – perhaps an early inspiration to Fnargl – was to tell the slave to go do whatever he wanted and found most profitable, then split the profits with him. Sometimes the slave would work a job at your workshop and you would pay him wages based on how well he did. Other times the slave would go off and make his way in the world and send you some of what he earned. Still other times, you would set a price for the slave’s freedom, and the slave would go and work and eventually come up with the mone and free himself.

Moes goes even further and says that these systems were so profitable that there were constant smouldering attempts to try this sort of thing in the American South. The reason they stuck with the whips-and-chains method owed less to economic considerations and more to racist government officials cracking down on lucrative but not-exactly-white-supremacy-promoting attempts to free slaves and have them go into business.

So in this case, a race to the bottom where competing plantations become crueler and crueler to their slaves in order to maximize competitiveness is halted by the physical limitation of cruelty not helping after a certain point.

Or to give another example, one of the reasons we’re not currently in a Malthusian population explosion right now is that women can only have one baby per nine months. If those weird religious sects that demand their members have as many babies as possible could copy-paste themselves, we would be in really bad shape. As it is they can only do a small amount of damage per generation.

3. Utility maximization. We’ve been thinking in terms of preserving values versus winning competitions, and expecting optimizing for the latter to destroy the former.

But many of the most important competitions / optimization processes in modern civilization are optimizing for human values. You win at capitalism partly by satisfying customers’ values. You win at democracy partly by satisfying voters’ values.

Suppose there’s a coffee plantation somewhere in Ethiopia that employs Ethiopians to grow coffee beans that get sold to the United States. Maybe it’s locked in a life-and-death struggle with other coffee plantations and want to throw as many values under the bus as it can to pick up a slight advantage.

But it can’t sacrifice quality of coffee produced too much, or else the Americans won’t buy it. And it can’t sacrifice wages or working conditions too much, or else the Ethiopians won’t work there. And in fact, part of its competition-optimization process is finding the best ways to attract workers and customers that it can, as long as it doesn’t cost them too much money. So this is very promising.

But it’s important to remember exactly how fragile this beneficial equilibrium is.

Suppose the coffee plantations discover a toxic pesticide that will increase their yield but make their customers sick. But their customers don’t know about the pesticide, and the government hasn’t caught up to regulating it yet. Now there’s a tiny uncoupling between “selling to Americans” and “satisfying Americans’ values”, and so of course Americans’ values get thrown under the bus.

Or suppose that there’s a baby boom in Ethiopia and suddenly there are five workers competing for each job. Now the company can afford to lower wages and implement cruel working conditions down to whatever the physical limits are. As soon as there’s an uncoupling between “getting Ethiopians to work here” and “satisfying Ethiopian values”, it doesn’t look too good for Ethiopian values either.

Or suppose someone invents a robot that can pick coffee better and cheaper than a human. The company fires all its laborers and throws them onto the street to die. As soon as the utility of the Ethiopians is no longer necessary for profit, all pressure to maintain it disappears.

Or suppose that there is some important value that is neither a value of the employees or the customers. Maybe the coffee plantations are on the habitat of a rare tropical bird that environmentalist groups want to protect. Maybe they’re on the ancestral burial ground of a tribe different from the one the plantation is employing, and they want it respected in some way. Maybe coffee growing contributes to global warming somehow. As long as it’s not a value that will prevent the average American from buying from them or the average Ethiopian from working for them, under the bus it goes.

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.

(from my very little knowledge of Marx, he understands this very very well and people who summarize him as “capitalists are greedy” are doing him a disservice)

And as well understood as the capitalist example is, I think it is less well appreciated that democracy has the same problems. Yes, in theory it’s optimizing for voter happiness which correlates with good policymaking. But as soon as there’s the slightest disconnect between good policymaking and electability, good policymaking has to get thrown under the bus.

For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement.

(Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the stunned governments!)

Turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours.

4. Coordination.

The opposite of a trap is a garden.

Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and finesse. An intense competition between agents has turned into a garden, with a single gardener dictating where everything should go and removing elements that do not conform to the pattern.

As I pointed out in the Non-Libertarian FAQ, government can easily solve the pollution problem with fish farms. The best known solution to the Prisoners’ Dilemma is for the mob boss (playing the role of a governor) to threaten to shoot any prisoner who defects. The solution to companies polluting and harming workers is government regulations against such. Governments solve arm races within a country by maintaining a monopoly on the use of force, and it’s easy to see that if a truly effective world government ever arose, international military buildups would end pretty quickly.

The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanism. Many other things besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.

For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions, jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example, against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them.

But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you).

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives.

Continue reading →

Biography

“Past is F*ing Prologue,” – The Origins of the Roger Stone-Donald Trump Relationship and the Ghost of Political Scandals Past

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Peter Grant

Jul 12, 2022 (Medium.com)

Roger Stone with former President Richard Nixon

“Past is fucking prologue,” — Stone’s Rule #4

This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.

ROGER STONE AND THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION

Convicted felon Roger Stone, one of America’s most infamous masters of the political dark arts and a longtime friend and advisor to former President Donald Trump, has come under renewed scrutiny for his promotion of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and for his activities in and around the January 6th insurrection.

Despite achieving prominence following the 2020 election, the idea that the election would be “rigged” against Trump was actually formulated and promulgated before the 2016 election.

The “Stop the Steal” rally that Trump addressed on January 6th immediately prior to the assault on the Capitol borrowed the phrase “Stop the Steal” from Stone, who had coined it as far back the 2016 Republican primaries.

In 2015, Stone facilitated Donald Trump’s first interview with Alex Jones of InfoWars. Jones, America’s most prominent conspiracy theorist, later introduced the idea that the 2016 election was going to be “rigged” against Trump.

Two days after Jones did so, Trump echoed the idea that the upcoming election would be “rigged” at a rally in Columbus, Ohio held on August 1st, 2016. Thus a seed was planted that would germinate for over five years. While Trump’s upset victory in 2016 obviated the need for the “Big Lie,” it was dusted off and put back into use after he lost the 2020 election.

Alex Jones interviewing Donald Trump on his program *InforWars in December of 2015*. The interview was facilitated by Roger Stone.

Stone is also linked to groups that were centrally involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Early in the Trump presidency, Stone was a central figure in the so-called “Russia investigation” conducted by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

At critical moments during the 2016 election, Stone was in touch with an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence, the entity that hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign and later provided the stolen emails to Wikileaks.

Shortly thereafter, Stone made public statements which suggested that he had prior, non-public knowledge that Wikileaks was in possession of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails.

Investigators have never been able to determine how Stone came into possession of this information. The investigation into Stone was obstructed and Trump later pardoned his old friend.

Stone lied under oath in testimony relating to these matters before Congress. He was subsequently indicted by Mueller’s prosecutors, with additional charges such as witness tampering to follow.

After being arrested and released on bail, Stone began interacting and coordinating with the now notorious right-wing group the Proud Boys, who occasionally served as his “body guards” during the various rallies and legal proceedings that followed.

Stone became friendly with Enrique “Ricky” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who is currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy.

According to the Washington Post, the FBI is investigating Stone and Alex Jones’ connections to the Proud Boys.

Roger Stone with Enrique “Ricky” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy related to the events of January 6th.

The far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, members of which are also currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy for storming the U.S. Capital, also have links to Roger Stone. During the protests in and around Washington, D.C. on January 5th and 6th, members of the Oath Keepers provided Roger Stone with security.

Oath Keeper Roberto Minuta, who is named in the indictment alongside Oath Keeper leader Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, was seen with Stone outside the Willard hotel in Washington, D.C. on the morning of January 6th. Alex Jones was also staying in a suite at the Willard Hotel, where he interviewed former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, one of the lead cheerleaders of the “rigged” election canard.

In another suite was located the so-called “Command Center” where, at various times, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, among others, plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the lead up to, and during, the January 6th insurrection.

Roger Stone seen outside of the Willard Hotel Roberto Minuta (far left), a member of the Oath Keepers currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy.

The exact role Roger Stone played in the unprecedented events of the January 6th insurrection remains to be fully explained. The path that led him to January 6th involves decades worth of involvement in political scandals, corruption, and criminal election stunts.

Stone developed an early conviction that American elections are often determined by dirty tricks, criminal associations and subterfuge. An account of Stone’s life, and the story of the circumstances by which he met Donald Trump, paints a disturbing picture.

ROGER STONE, RICHARD NIXON, AND WATERGATE

Roger Stone was born in 1952 and grew up in Lewisboro, New York. Half Italian and half Hungarian, Stone’s mother wrote for a local newspaper and his father was a laborer who dug wells for a living.

Though as a child he had supported John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic and “had better hair than Nixon,” upon receiving a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone became a staunch Republican at the age of 11.

“I read this book,” Stone told The Washington Post, “and I was completely transformed into a zealot.”

During Goldwater’s Presidential run, Stone rode his bike to the local campaign headquarters after school each day to lick envelopes and run errands. The 12 year-old Stone cried after Goldwater lost. However, his passion for politics remained undimmed. By age 13 Stone was taking the train into New York City to work weekends for William F. Buckley, Jr’s unsuccessful bid to become mayor.

Stone developed an early fascination with Richard Nixon and came to believe that he “had been fucked out of the presidency in 1960, thanks to Joe Kennedy and [his] mob friends.”

It is worth pausing for a moment to note how alleged acts of chicanery in the 1960 presidential election influenced Stone’s views on politics.

Another individual who believed the 1960 election had been stolen was Richard Nixon himself. Indeed, this belief influenced Nixon’s later sabotaging of President Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations in Vietnam during the 1968 election, as well as the activities and events the led to the Watergate scandal.

After Nixon’s 1960 loss, Stone penned a letter to the candidate encouraging him to run again. Nixon replied with a thank you note, telling Stone that he had no plans to run again but if he did, he would be in touch. Stone’s passion for Nixon would remain undimmed for the rest of his life, ultimately leading him to get a tattoo of the former President on his back.

Stone later moved to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University. At a time when the counterculture movement was in full steam, Stone joined the Young American’s for Freedom.

During Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, Stone invited Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), to speak before the college’s Young Republican Club. “There are a bunch of hippie-type, leftwing, pinko degenerates that attend and harass him, but he handles it okay,” Stone recalled of the event.

Afterwards, Stone asked Magruder for a job and was hired. He dropped out of college and joined CREEP.

Stone served as the assistant to the President of CREEP Bart Porter, who also ran the organizations notorious dirty tricks operations. During the day, the 19 year-old Stone worked as a scheduler for Nixon campaign surrogates. “By night, I’m trafficking in the black arts. Nixon’s people were obsessed with intelligence.”

Under orders from Porter, Stone arranged for a spy named Michael McMinoway, operating under the codename Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign.

Under the pseudonym Jason Rainier, Stone provided donations in the name of the Young Socialist to the campaign of Democrat Pete McCloskey and then forwarded the receipts to the newspaper. Stone’s experiences during the Nixon campaign would have an enduring influence on both his political ideology and his reputation as a “dirty trickster.”

It’s a reputation that far from run away from, he’s spent a lifetime cultivating.

“Roger likes the aura of having done something bad in the past,” said Stone friend David Keene in reference to his hijinks for CREEP during the Nixon reelection campaign. “You get the feeling that he’s sorry it was so minor. He likes to say, ‘Watch me, I’m a tough guy.’”

After Nixon won reelection in 1972, Stone got a job at the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for many of the programs initiated under Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. As Stone describes it, H.R. “Bob” Halderman’s, “charge to us was to dismantle, replace, and fire everybody.”

A year later Halderman was embroiled in the raging Watergate scandal and was tried on counts of perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Stone had been renting a room from Bart Porter. On the evening of the Watergate break-in, Stone claims that Porter was out of town so he took urgent phone messages from a variety of individuals associated with the break-in, including G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative of the White House Plumbers unit.

Nixon went on to become the first and only President to resign from office to avoid being impeached and removed.

Following Nixon’s fall from grace, Stone got a job in December 1973 as a junior staffer for Senator Robert Dole. However, six months after he began, Stone’s association with the “Ratfuckers” of the Nixon campaign was revealed during a Congressional hearing and he was forced to leave Dole’s staff.

In the immediate aftermath of Watergate, many Republicans wished to avoid the taint of scandal and Stone admits, “It was tough to get a job for a couple of years.”

ROGER STONE AND THE REAGAN REVOLUTION

Roger Stone with President Ronald Reagan.

In 1976, Stone served on Ronald Reagan’s first unsuccessful attempt to garner the Republican nomination as the campaigns Youth Director. A year later he formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee with fellow young Republicans Charles Black and Terry Dolan.

The Committee pioneered the practice of bundling campaign contributions in order to circumvent campaign finance limits on individual contributions. It served as a precursor to super Political Action Committees (PACs) that came to dominate politics. It was at this time that Stone worked beneath the legendary Republican pollster and negative campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who had an enduring influence on Stone.

In the spring of 1977, Stone ran to be the chairman of the Young Republicans. A network of influential Republicans between the ages of 18–40, in the days of brokered conventions the Young Republicans was an influential organization. Stone’s candidacy was managed by a young, up-and-coming Republican operative named Paul Manafort.

Manafort later served as chairman of the 2016 Trump Campaign after Stone lobbied the candidate to hire him. Stone and Manafort had known each other from their days in the College Republicans. Manafort managed to convince Stone’s chief rival to run for treasurer instead of president with a promise of future support that he later broke.

Stone won after a campaign that Manafort would later describe as, “one of the great fuck jobs.”

Lobbyists and partners Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Black (left to right).

By the time Stone was elected Chairman of the Young Republicans, he was already working on Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In this capacity, Stone was introduced to one of America’s most infamous lawyers and political fixers: Roy Cohn.

Stone’s meeting with Roy Cohn in 1979 was perhaps one of the most consequential of his life. Years later, whenever asked about who his heroes were, Stone listed Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon and the Duke of Windsor. It was an unconventional list, but revealing of the man’s taste and character.

ROY COHN AND THE BIRTH OF THE ROGER STONE-DONALD TRUMP POLITICAL ALLIANCE

Roger Stone standing with New York lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn

Roy Cohn exploded into the American national consciousness as an infamous player in the Red Scare of the 1950s. With the drawing of the Iron Curtain, the onset of the Cold War and the discovery of significant Soviet intelligence infiltration of American political, military and scientific institutions, a sense of fear and in many cases near hysteria swept over the body politic. As is so often the case in moments such as these, reasonable fears can be seized upon by unscrupulous demagogues for their own political purposes.

Cohn was a child prodigy. He graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and through his family’s political connections landed a job at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. His early cases involved the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, and the infamous Rosenberg trial. The most controversial part of the trial came during sentencing. The Rosenbergs, accused of sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets, were found guilty.

Cohn claimed that the judge presiding over the trial, Judge Irving Kaufman, owed his position to Cohn’s father, who was a judge based out of the Bronx. Cohn further claimed that he had Kaufman assigned to the case through his connections to the district court’s clerk office. Evidence suggests that Cohn engaged in inappropriate communications with Judge Kaufman at the time he was contemplating what sentences to impose. Cohn suggested the death penalty, and that’s what the Rosenbergs received.

The vast majority of individuals caught up in the Red Scare were innocent and many lives were needlessly destroyed. The demagoguery, hysteria and self-serving cynicism of the era found its personification in Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, giving rise to the epithet McCarthyism.

Cohn started working with Joe McCarthy as his chief counsel in 1953. McCarthy had built a national profile by making outlandish claims of Communist infiltration and subversion infecting nearly all walks of American life, from Hollywood to the State Department to the Pentagon. McCarthy and Cohn’s hunt for hidden Communists inordinately impacted members of the Jewish faith and homosexuals.

For Cohn to have played such a prominent role in the persecution of these communities was curious indeed as he was both Jewish and a closeted homosexual.

Infamous Red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy with his young chief counsel Roy Cohn.

McCarthy’s enemies found the opportunity to pounce when it came to the drafting into the military of G. David Schine, an unpaid “Chief Consultant” working with McCarthy and Cohn. After it became clear that Cohn was seeking preferential treatment for Schine, a scandal broke and culminated in the the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

The hearings led to McCarthy’s downfall and Cohn’s banishment from Washington. Cohn was outclassed and out-lawyered by the Chief Counsel of the US Army Joseph N. Welch, who in a confrontation with McCarthy uttered the phrase that marked the end of the McCarthy era, “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

Cohn returned to New York where he became one of the city’s most influential power brokers. He developed a reputation as a “legal executioner.” His methods were relentless and unethical.

His professional and personal life were constantly under scrutiny, and yet he always seemed to get away with it. In the 1960’s, when his rival Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, Cohn was indicted four times but acquitted in each an every case. In the 1970’s he was charged with violating banking laws in Illinois and was again acquitted.

Cohn represented the most senior members of the American Mafia. He once boasted that he had gotten Irving Saypol, the the prosecutor of the Rosenberg case, his job as US Attorney. According to Cohn, Saypol’s appointment needed to be approved by Frank Costello, boss of the legendary Luciano crime family (later known as the Genovese crime family), one of the New York mafia’s infamous Five Families.

“In those days, nobody became U.S. Attorney in New York without the O.K. from the mob,” Cohn stated. “But Saypol would not have gotten the nod from Costello without me.”

Infamous and politically connected leader of the Genovese Crime Family Frank Costello.

Cohn’s connections to the FBI, he was a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s, along with his network judges, prosecutors and district attorneys, made him an ideal lawyer for a wide range of mafioso. His clients included Genovese Crime Family underboss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Bonanno boss Carmine “Nino” Galante and numerous members of the Gambino crime family including Carmine Fatico, Aniello Dellacroce, Tommy and Joe Gambino, Angelo Ruggiero and a young and a then little known mobster by the name of John Gotti.

Federal anti-organized crime strike force members told Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman that in the 70s, when wiretapping was increasingly becoming an issue, members of “The Commission,” the governing body of the American mafia, met in Roy’s office because attorney-client privilege made recordings in-admissible in court.

While at the top of his game as a political fixer and mafia attorney in New York, Roy Cohn met a brash young real estate developer by the name of Donald J. Trump.

Roy Cohn with a young Donald J. Trump at the opening of Trump Tower.

In 1973, the U.S. Justice Department sued the Trump Organization for housing discrimination against blacks. After a chance encounter at a Manhattan watering hole called Le Club in which Trump bemoaned the timidity of his lawyers, Cohn took Trump on as a client. In typical Cohn fashion, he countersued DOJ for $100 million. The case eventually settled.

Trump was enthralled with Cohn, who went on to play a pivotal role in Manhattan real estate career. Trump also developed a new appreciation for the benefits of having a consummate legal fixer that he took with him to the White House.

Roger Stone tells several variations of the story of how he first met Roy Cohn in 1979. In one version of events, Stone first met Cohn at a party held by Sheila Mosler, a socialite and vice chairman of the New York County Republican Committee.

In another, Roy Cohn’s name came up on a rolodex given to him by Michael Deaver, an advisor to Ronald Reagan. At the time, the 27-year old Stone was the political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for the Reagan Campaign.

Regardless of how initial contact was made, all the stories end up with Roger visiting Roy at his 68th Street townhouse in Manhattan.

Roger Stone with Ronald Reagan, whose campaign he served as the political director for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

“When I got there, Roy was in his bathrobe, eating three strips of bacon burned crisp and both halves of a deviled egg,” Stone later recalled. He noticed a heavy set man sitting next to Cohn.

“Mr. Stone, I want you to meet Tony Salerno,” Cohn said, introducing the young Reagan staffer to the underboss of the Genovese crime family.

Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Genovese Crime Family underboss and client of Roy Cohn’s.

“So Roy says we’re going with Reagan this time,” Salerno chimed in. Stone launched into his pitch for Reagan as Cohn and Fat Tony listened intently.

“You know, Tony, everything’s fixed.” Stone quoted Cohn as saying. “Everything can be handled.” Salerno mentioned the Supreme Court. Cohn continued. “Cost a few more dollars.”

“He started telling me how he was going to help me set up the Reagan Campaign,” Stone said of Cohn. “[E]verything from union endorsements to office space. He told me to ride down to the courthouse with him. He had a young lawyer with him, and it was clear that Roy knew nothing about the case he was going to argue. But he knew it didn’t matter. He used to say, ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ Roy knew how the world worked.”

Years later, Stone told the reporter Matt Labash that he suggested to Cohn that if they could get the candidate John B. Anderson to make a bid for the Presidency on behalf of New York’s Liberal Party, it would split the vote between Carter and Anderson and deliver the New York to Reagan.

“Let me look into it,” Roy replied. Shortly thereafter, Cohn told Stone, “You need to go see this lawyer… and see what his number is.”

“Roy, I don’t understand,” Stone replied.

“How much cash he wants, dumbfuck,” Cohn shouted.

Stone claims to have visited the lawyer and learned that his number was $125,000 cash. Thinking the number was outlandish, Roger returned to Cohn thinking with a number that high that was the end of it. Not according to Cohn, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”

“There’s a suitcase,” Stone explained to Labash. “I don’t look in the suitcase… I don’t even know what was in the suitcase… I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

Remarkably, neither Stone’s introduction to a crime boss, nor the alleged plot to split the liberal vote, was the most important consequence of his meeting with Roy Cohn. Cohn provided Stone with an introduction that would change the course of American history.

“You need to meet Donald and his father,” Cohn insisted. “They’d be perfect for this. Let me set up a meeting.”

“I went to go see him,” Stone recalled, “and Trump said, ‘How do you get Reagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics] — a political junkie. Then he said, ‘O.K., we are in. Go see my father.”

Stone travelled to Fred Trump’s Avenue Z office in Coney Island. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan for President.’ It was not illegal — it was bundling. Check trading.”

The Trumps even arranged for Stone to open Reagan’s New York City campaign headquarters in a townhouse next to the 21 Club. It was the beginning of a fateful political alliance.

Roger Stone was hardly the only member of the Reagan Campaign that Cohn was connected to. According to notes taken by Cohn‘s switchboard operator, Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, William Casey, “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.”

Casey was a Wall Street investor and a veteran of America’s World War II-era intelligence service the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). Following the 1980 election, reporters and researchers alleged that Casey cut an “October Surprise” deal with the Iranians, who were holding American diplomatic personnel hostage, to wait until after the election to release them.

Nearly four decades later, Stone and another 1980 Reagan campaign alum, Paul Manafort, would be suspected of “colluding” with a foreign adversary to impact a domestic election.

Interestingly, Stone addressed the so-called “October Surprise” allegations in a book he co-authored with Saint John Hunt during the 2016 Republican primary attacking Jeb Bush and the Bush family in general.

Former OSS officer and Reagan Campaign manager, William Casey standing with Ronald Reagan. Casey, who later led the CIA during the Iran-Contra scandal, is alleged to have negotiated with the Iranians during the 1980 election to delay the release of American hostages until after the election in what became known as the “October Surprise.”

“The Reagan/Bush camp needed to cut a secret deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages before the election,” Stone and Hunt write in Jeb! And The Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty.

“As it turned out, the hostages were not released as Carter had promised, and partly as a result of the years-long standoff with the Iranians, Carter lost the election. On January 21st, 1981, the very day that Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, the hostages found themselves on a plane to freedom. Coincidence? The accusations that Reagan and Bush had somehow thwarted the Carter/Iranian deal to free the hostages by election time, thereby winning the election for [Reagan], were rampant. How much of a role did [Bush] play? That’s the million dollar question.”

Stone and Hunt later continue, “Political researcher Robert Morrow interviewed retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman in 2009 in Austin, Texas. Inman, who was involved in intelligence for over 25 years, told Morrow that he was convinced that the Reagan campaign made a deal with the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after the 1980 general election. Inman said he was completely convinced Reagan campaign chair William Casey was involved in such a deal, but he said he did not think G.H.W. Bush was involved because Casey hated Bush. Inman worked at high levels of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency while Bush was CIA director in 1976 and they developed a close working relationship.”

“So, as with so many other “facts,” we come to our own conclusions. Do we believe that our candidate was honest and would never dream of co-opting a presidential deal for his own gain? No, I say.” A curious thing to say, seeing as Stone himself had worked on the campaign.

So it appears that just as be believed that Joseph Kennedy had used his connections to Organized Crime to steal the 1960 election, Roger Stone is just as convinced that Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who later became Reagan’s director of the CIA and became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, had negotiated with enemies of the United States to engage in activities that would impact the outcome of a Presidential election.

Thirty six years later, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would find himself courting help from another American adversary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Roger Stone was exactly where he wanted to be, at the very heart of the controversy.

Forty years later, decades of political corruption and lies would culminate in a violent assault on the very seat of American democracy.

The next article will cover Stone’s involvement in the 1981 New Jersey Governors race and lobbying work for Donald Trump.

You can find my collected writings here.

Event, International

World Clap Day — August 16, 2026

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

(worldclapday.com)

In Humanity We Clap.

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Type your city to see when you should clap.

Examples: London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Mumbai, Lagos, Mexico City

Pacific time: 07:00 (7:00 AM), 16 August 2026

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Wall of Claps

The Wall of Claps is the permanent record of founding supporters. Every name is a clap. Every clap is a signal that we can unite.

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World Clap Day – A Global Moment of Unity

Our Mission

World Clap Day is a global event happening on August 16, 2026. At one exact coordinated moment, people all around the world will clap their hands for one second.

No politics. No religion. No agenda.

Just one simple, universal action done together.

It is a celebration of being alive. A reminder that beyond language, culture, or beliefs, we are human first.

For one second, the world moves as one.

The goal is not noise. The goal is unity.

Through the simplest action possible, we prove that billions of different people can synchronize, not because of tragedy or crisis, but simply to celebrate existence.

Our Vision

On August 16, 2026 all cities are invited.

In every country, people will meet in the main squares of their cities. Friends, families, strangers. Standing side by side.

This will be broadcast online and become real in the streets.

Before the synchronized clap, each city hosts its own celebration. Music. Food. Local artists. Conversations. A moment of community.

Then, at the exact coordinated second, everyone claps together. Not just imagining the world is connected, but knowing it is.

Large screens in the main squares broadcast the central live feed of the event. Cities see each other. Crowds see crowds. Continents see continents.

The synchronization becomes visible. Tangible. Undeniable.

And immediately after that one second, the silence breaks into a massive applause to celebrate humanity.

For what the world just proved it can do. A peaceful, voluntary, global coordination of joy.

This transforms the idea from a social media movement into a physical global gathering. From movement into experience.

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Our Mission – World Clap Day

Consciousness, Spirituality, Uncategorized

Rumi on what’s comfortable

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Rumi, by Iranian artist Hossein Behzad (1957)

“Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”

~ Rumi

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, commonly known as Rumi, was a Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the Islamic brotherhood known as the Mevlevi Order. His family hailed from Balkh. Rumi is an influential figure in Sufism, and his thought and works loom large both in Persian literature and mystic poetry in general. Wikipedia

Born September 30, 1207, Balkh, Afghanistan

Died December 17, 1273 (age 66 years), Konya, Türkiye

Education, Quotes

Thomas More on education

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Sir Thomas More (1527)

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”

~ Thomas More

Sir Thomas More, venerated in the Catholic Church as a martyr and saint, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, theologian and Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord Chancellor from October 1529 to May 1532. Wikipedia

Born Feb 7, 1478

Died Jul 6, 1535

Consciousness

The Cosmic Web

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

(oldnewmethod.com)

Old New Method book

Download the first chapterJoin our mailing list and receive the first chapter of our book

Vincenzo recently asked me how to help grow the Italian community. Although this type of question has come up throughout all communities from the beginning of this school, for whatever reason, it struck me differently this time.

There is a cosmic web that invisibly links us to our fellow practitioners. We perceive it only when awake and remain ignorant of it whilst asleep. Their presence is not incidental to ours; our efforts — or lack of efforts — mutually reinforce each other. Although it works mysteriously, it is also quite grounded: if I witness someone else making extra effort, or sacrificing something I know to be dear to them, those efforts put more pressure on me to work seriously. And on the other hand, if I witness someone making excuses and giving justifications, I am tempted to do the same.

Ouspensky described this web in the following way: “A man can rise to the next step of the staircase only by putting another man in his place… this is a general principle… Putting people in one’s place is school-work, that is, the joint efforts of all the people belonging to the school. All school-work is organized with this purpose in view… to put new people in the place occupied by the people who are there at present and in this way to help them rise to other steps.”

In a comment during our Enneagram and Three Poisons sessions, Eva spoke of experiencing a special state in which “there was no sense of ‘I’ to judge things as good or bad…” It is exactly this illusory sense of ‘I’ that values one’s own development so much more than the development of others. Imagine not having a particular interest in ‘my own development’ over the development of anyone else; of being as interested in the progress of others as in one’s own.

Certainly, such selflessness is the best foundation for external consideration, and the more we are able to experience it, the more our communities will grow — both through our being more helpful to others, and through the thick cosmic web we form.

Life, Quotes

Antoine de Saint-Exupery on the condition of existence

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

(Netflix.com)

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. Source: Wikipedia

Born Jun 29, 1900

Died 1 July 1944

Astrology

What are the metaphysical implications of the total solar eclipse on August 12?

July 26, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Google AI Overview

The August 12, 2026 total solar eclipse in Leo acts as a powerful cosmic accelerator. Metaphysically, it symbolizes a profound shadow-side reset, marrying the fiery, heart-centered, and ego-driven energy of Leo with a temporary blackout of conscious vitality, forcing a deep reckoning with personal authenticity, courage, and inner truth. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Leo Archetype and the Ego

Identity and the Crown: Leo governs the sun, the heart, self-expression, and pride. When the moon completely blocks the sun, it creates an eclipse of the ego. [1, 2, 3]
Shedding False Masks: Metaphysically, this asks you to look at where your self-worth depends on external applause rather than internal sovereignty. [1]
Embracing Vulnerability: True Leo courage is exposed not by always shining, but by allowing your unpolished, authentic self to exist even in the dark. [1]

The Shadowed New Beginning

Cosmic Fast-Tracking: Unlike a standard new moon, a total solar eclipse acts as a portal for fated doors to open and close.
Stepping Out of the Dark: Because the light of the sun is momentarily stolen, it represents a sacred pause—a fertile void where intentions planted now take root invisibly before manifesting by the next major lunar shift.
Creative Rebirth: The energies favor pivoting toward passions, playfulness, and reclaiming the uninhibited joy of the inner child. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

If you’d like to explore how this impacts you personally, tell me your zodiac sign or rising sign so we can look at which life area this Leo eclipse activates for you.

August 12 Solar Eclipse: A Shadowed New Beginning

(theseasonalsoul.com)

August 12 solar eclipse symbolizing a shadowed new beginning in late summer (Image credit: David Gomez/Unsplash)

What Is the August 12 Solar Eclipse Asking You to Begin?

Late Summer is a threshold season.

The first harvest has arrived. Something has grown. Something has been forming in your life, whether you’ve been tending it consciously or not. And now, as the light begins to subtly change, the energy of the year starts to turn.

We are not fully in autumn yet. But we are no longer in the bright outwardness of early summer either. This is the long, golden in-between — a season of ripening, discernment, preparation, and reorientation. The solar eclipse arrives in the middle of that threshold, intensifying the quiet sense that something is shifting beneath the surface.

The August 12 solar eclipse arrives in late summer, bringing the energy of a New Moon magnified — a shadowed beginning, a moment of transformation, and an invitation to notice what is stirring beneath the surface. Spiritually, this eclipse invites you to pause, release what has run its course, and return to deeper alignment with yourself before the season begins to turn inward.

What the August 12 Solar Eclipse Means Spiritually

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Spiritually, a solar eclipse is like a new moon magnified. It brings the energy of new beginnings, but not always in a clear or obvious way. It is a shadowed beginning — a moment when ordinary visibility is disrupted, and something deeper has a chance to emerge.

Solar eclipses only occur during new moons. It is a moment when the moon moves between the earth and the sun, casting shadow across the light. For a little while, what we usually see is hidden. The brightness dims. The familiar shape of the day is interrupted.

And spiritually, that interruption matters. Because sometimes the light we are used to seeing by is not the same as clarity. Sometimes, when the usual brightness fades, we can finally notice what has been hidden.

During a solar eclipse, the sun gives way to darkness. Something unseen is being revealed. Something beneath the surface may begin to stir. Something in you may be ready to step forward, even if you do not yet know exactly what it is.

A solar eclipse can signal a deeper turning point — the beginning of a larger chapter, a shift that may continue unfolding over weeks or months. This solar eclipse is not asking you to rush forward. It is asking you to pause, listen, and notice what is beginning in the dark.

A New Beginning You May Not Fully Understand

We often think new beginnings should feel exciting, obvious, or clean. A door opens. A path appears. A clear vision arrives. But eclipse beginnings are not always like that.

Eclipses happen in shadow, so they rarely reveal everything at once. The ending and the beginning may not be completely clear yet. You may not know what is shifting. You may not have language for what is changing. You may simply feel more tender, more restless, more aware that something inside you is asking for your attention.

That does not mean you are doing it wrong. It may mean you are standing at the beginning of a transformation that is still unfolding beneath the surface.

This is especially true in late summer. In nature, fruit does not ripen all at once. It forms slowly. It gathers sweetness over time. It needs warmth, attention, and patience before it is ready to be harvested. The same can be true for your own becoming.

Something may be ripening in you now that is not ready to be named yet. Something may be asking for more space, more honesty, more light.

What Is Trying to Get Your Attention?

During a solar eclipse, the earth moves into the sun’s shadow, making it a good time to get a glimpse of our own shadows. And that feels like the heart of this eclipse: Not fear. Not urgency. Not prediction. Just attention.

What is arising in you right now? What are you noticing? What feels louder than usual, or harder to ignore?

Sometimes our shadows reveal themselves through big emotional moments. But often, they speak in smaller ways: avoidance, resentment, exhaustion, longing, envy, restlessness, or the quiet ache of knowing something is no longer aligned.

A good clue into your shadow is to notice what irritates you. Where do you feel annoyed or extra frustrated right now? What is getting under your skin? Is there something deeper this feeling is trying to show you?

This does not mean every difficult feeling needs to become a project. It simply means your inner life is speaking. And this eclipse invites you to listen.

The Shadow Can Be Revealing

Late summer shadows over a meadow (Image Credit: Anne Nygård/Unsplash.com) — In the shadowed pause, something deeper can be felt.

The solar eclipse is not only about what is hidden. It is also about what is ready to be revealed.

This late summer solar eclipse is about letting yourself shine, so you can transform and start a new chapter more aligned with your soul. That does not have to mean a dramatic reinvention. It may be much quieter than that.

Maybe you’re asking for more honesty in one area of your life. Maybe you are ready to stop performing a version of yourself that feels too small. Maybe something you have been carrying is becoming too heavy to keep pretending it is fine. Maybe an old pattern, habit, or way of operating has shown you all it can teach you. Maybe the mask is beginning to loosen.

During the eclipse, darkness falls. The part of us that is usually visible — the self we show the world, the self that functions and manages and keeps things together — is briefly obscured. And in that shadowed pause, something deeper can be felt: your inner light, the true self beneath the noise.

This is not about forcing yourself to become more authentic overnight. It is about noticing where you are being invited back into alignment.

Where does your life feel out of alignment right now? Where are you ready to be more honest with yourself? What part of you is asking to come forward?

What Might Be Ready to Fall Away

Every beginning also asks for a release.

That is one reason eclipse energy can feel intense. Not because it is here to punish us, but because it can make it harder to ignore what is already shifting.

During an eclipse, shadows emerge so we can see what needs releasing: old patterns, old stories, old habits, old ways of protecting ourselves that once made sense, but no longer support who we are becoming.

And because this eclipse arrives in late summer, the question becomes even more seasonal: What has grown this year that you are ready to carry forward? And what has run its course?

The first harvest has already invited us to notice what has been forming. But harvest is never only about gathering. It is also about discernment. We begin to see what is nourishing, what is ready, what still needs care, and what will not come with us into the next season.

This solar eclipse may not give you all the answers. But it may show you the next honest thing.

How to Work With This Solar Eclipse Gently

You do not need to do anything dramatic for this eclipse. You do not need to make a huge decision, force a breakthrough, or understand everything immediately. In fact, this may be a better time for quiet attention than decisive action.

Let the eclipse be a sacred pause before the harvest.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Light a candle if you would like, or simply close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Let this be your way of saying: This moment matters. I’m here for it.

Use these prompts as a gentle way to work with the solar eclipse. You do not need perfect answers. Let your responses be honest, unfinished, and alive.

Ask yourself:

What is coming up for me right now? What feels like it is trying to get my attention?
Where do I feel annoyed, tender, restless, or unusually activated? What might this be showing me?
Have any old stories, habits, or ways of operating been revealing themselves lately?
What new seed would I like to plant in the dark?

A Quiet Seed in the Dark

If you would like to close your reflection with a simple act, write down one word or phrase that captures what you are ready to grow into. Fold it up and place it somewhere meaningful — on your altar, in your journal, under your pillow, or somewhere you will come across it again.

Let it be a quiet seed of something new beginning.

You do not have to know how it will grow. You do not have to understand the whole path yet.

This is the work right now: to honor what is beginning in the dark, to listen for what is trying to emerge, and to trust that transformation can begin long before you can fully see it.

Late summer reminds us that growth does not always arrive as certainty. Sometimes it begins as a subtle shift. A shadowed knowing. A quiet return to yourself.

And beneath the surface, something sacred may already be taking root.

What This Solar Eclipse Might Mean for You

If there is one message this eclipse carries, it is this:

You do not need to become someone new. You only need to recognize who you have become.

The growth of summer has already been happening. The lessons have already been unfolding. The seeds have already been planted.

This eclipse offers a brief pause in the brightness — a chance to gather yourself before the season turns. A chance to notice what is ripening, honor your growth, and begin the next chapter with greater intention.

As late summer slowly gives way to harvest season, trust that you do not need to force what comes next.

Nature never rushes the harvest.

Jed Diamond

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