Categories
strategy

strategic incompetence

When organisations confuse confidence with competence, wealth with wisdom, and power with understanding, incompetence is no longer simply a failure of leadership but becomes one of its preferred production methods.

Categories
Philosophy

of red caps and lacquered smiles

The court of red caps and lacquered smiles now finds itself chained to a king who mistakes appetite for destiny and spectacle for wisdom at precisely the historical moment requiring restraint, literacy, diplomacy, patience, and institutional coherence.

Categories
history

Peace, please…

For years, he sold himself as the man who could end wars through instinct, pressure, spectacle, and personal dominance alone, yet the deeper problem now emerging in the Middle East is not merely strategic failure but the exposure of an intellectual and moral vacuum at the centre of that performance. Peace is not a television […]

Categories
politics

Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein became more than a criminal case. He became a symbol of a deeper public suspicion: that extreme wealth, celebrity, political access, legal asymmetry, and institutional influence often converge into protected networks insulated from the consequences faced by ordinary people. Sealed documents, negotiated immunity deals, damaged evidence chains, elite associations, private islands, missing transparency, […]

Categories
Philosophy

An American Error

Enter a Chorus, beholding the Republic as a cracked glass. Behold the man, not monster, but a mirror, Wherein an age, long sick yet self-amazed, Doth spy its own deformity and cry, “Lo, greatness!” He is no thunderbolt from heaven cast, But weather bred within the common air: Distrust made flesh, grievance given tongue, Ambition […]

Categories
history

The Few

Never in the conduct of public affairs has so much risk been imposed upon so many by the reckless certainty of so few, and most of all by the belligerent incompetence of one man.

Categories
cybernetics

Managed Peace

Managed peace is the hard, ongoing work of keeping real conflict from tipping a tightly coupled world into outcomes it cannot survive.

Categories
Philosophy

Telemetry of Systemic Greed

Donald Trump’s political method appears less like governance than domination: pressure, spectacle, threat, loyalty-testing, and the constant conversion of complexity into personal grievance. The more important question may not be whether this reveals his own limitations, which are visible enough in the public record, but what kind of system could look at those limitations and […]

Categories
politics

The Sleep of Reason

Is America sleepwalking into tyrrany? El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Context: How far would Trump go? I’m really very grateful that I live in a democracy that is not, currently at least, painfully and publicly disassembling itself.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Facebook might also Dump Trump but the Fakes are here to stay

Context: Facebook staffers walk out saying Trump’s posts should be reined in It is interesting to reflect that, shameless Executive bloviation notwithstanding, information and communications technologies from (for instance) Lascaux through emojis have never really been about truth and falsity so much as they have been about naked self-replication of the encoded system they bear. […]