If you can believe it, I have now been writing this blog for six years. Today is The Teeming Brain’s birthday. I launched it on June 13, 2006, and was surprised and gratified to see a sizable audience come together rather rapidly. In the launch post I said, among other things: The expression “teeming brain”…
Recommended Reading 11
This week’s reading covers: social, political, economic, and cultural craziness and breakdown in America and Europe; a dystopian view of smartphones; an official CDC denial of a zombie holocaust in the wake of horrific incidents flooding the American media; the possible action of quantum effects in the macro-world; a cogent criticism of scientistic materialism in…
“Reincarnation”: An entrancing experimental video
Find a quiet, solitary environment free of distractions, turn up your speakers or put in your earbuds, and let this thing unfold in full-screen mode. I was mesmerized myself. The music, not incidentally, is Black Sabbath’s psychedelic and hypnotic “Planet Caravan,” representing a style that is pointedly not what the band is most widely remembered…
A world without Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury, photo by NASA (http://history.nasa.gov/EP-125/part6.htm) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons I was stunned when the news of Ray Bradbury’s death broke today. Yes, he was a very old man who suffered from declining health, a man who obviously stood near the end of his life. But that’s immaterial to my emotional reaction. When…
Recommended Reading 10
This week’s links and reading cover apocalyptic trends and their cultural, psychological, and artistic/literary aspects; economic collapse in America and Europe, with attendant venality on the part of politicians and the wealthy elite; the rise of an über-surveillance state in America; epic protests in Canada; the decline and fall (and continued decline after falling) of…
Our religious transvaluation of money: From cosmic evil to “doing God’s work”
The cover feature for the current issue of Boston Review, titled “How Markets Crowd Out Morals,” takes the form of a hugely stimulating forum on the thesis put forth by Harvard government professor Michael Sandel in his new book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (which I’ve referenced here previously). Sandel argues…
Decline, collapse, and doom: Snapshots from Europe, America, and planet earth
This morning when I went to scan the day’s delivery of essays, news, and information, one of the first things that came to my attention was this: Nothing I’ve heard from politicians or economists on the world crisis has shivered my spine like an hour spent with the gentle‑mannered historian Antony Beevor, whose mighty new…
Recommended Reading 9
This week’s recommended articles, essays, and blog posts cover: various possible modes of doom that await us (or that are facing us right now), including climate change, economic collapse, and some other usual suspects; the hijacking of global culture by money and its possibly psychopathic servants; the historical role of alchemy in giving birth to…
Psychiatry’s internal war over “mental illness” unhinges everything
Have you or anybody you care about ever suffered from depression? How about bipolar disorder? Autism? Schizophrenia? Attention-deficit disorder? Obviously, given the prevalence of these mental and neurological illnesses, the answer is almost certainly affirmative. Or then again, maybe not. Here’s the dirty little trick that’s been pulled on all of us: each of those…
The dumbing of American political speech has truly apocalyptic implications
NPR reported it this morning, and I listened with rapt attention during my commute to work: It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a…