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Are my hot flashes due to an estrogen imbalance or a rapidly warming planet hastened by unaccountable oil barons who own our elections?

Am I irritable because my progesterone is low, or because social media has turned my prefrontal cortex into a 24-7 whack-a-mole game to sell me Norwegian wrinkle cream?

Do I have hormonal brain fog, or am I just lost in a for-profit insurance company’s updated phone tree?

Is my dwindling libido estrogen-related, or did I get a mid-coitus push notification that democracy might be dead because of Logan Paul’s YouTube?

Is urinary incontinence a symptom of perimenopause, or are my bladder muscles atrophied from too many years wearing diapers on the floor of an Amazon warehouse?

Is my hair thinning, or am I ripping it out because a thirty-four-time convicted, sexually abusive steak salesman with a Hannibal Lecter fetish is five points ahead in Arizona?

Are my migraines hormonal, or am I thinking too hard about how Peter Thiel has more money than all nurses on Earth combined?

While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for America’s national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China’s increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained U.S. military build-up in the region have strengthened Washington’s position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture America’s Asia-Pacific alliance relatively soon. Recent events illustrate the rising tensions... Read more

“Musk’s Super PAC Offers $47 to Those Who Help It Find Trump Voters”
— New York Times, 10/7/24

Please help. My brain is like the Cybertruck nav system. I know something’s wrong there, but no one can figure it out.

I’ve read all the psychology books, but none of them address desperately needing the validation of someone named “Catturd.”

Any therapists out there? What’s the name of the syndrome that causes you to turn into the MyPillow guy?

When I watch the movie Tremors, why do I identify with the worms?

Why is there a void in my soul bigger than the debris field of one of my rockets?

Why can’t I ever just shut up? Better to stay quiet and be thought a fool than to retweet #EndWokeness and remove all doubt.

- by Klaus M Stiefel

Read at Psyche

- by Steve Nadis & Shing-Tung Yau

Read at Aeon

When we want to change the world we’re usually reacting to a problem. Even positive visions usually come out of negatives. We want liberty because we have tyranny. We want health because we have sickness. We want prosperity because we have poverty. We want equality because some people have way more than they need and others less than need.

When we solve a problem it’s generally mediated by a principle. Very often the principle is just the problem stated slightly differently.

Problem: Some people have more than they need, others have less than they need.

Principle: Make sure no one has more than they need while anybody has less than they need.

A principle tells you, generally speaking, what you should be doing about a problem. It doesn’t tell you how to do it.

So, for the example above, post-war Welfare states generally came upon the solution: