Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

June 27, 2026

Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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February 28, 2026February 28, 2026

The Applause of Fools: How Erasmus Predicted Every Century After His Own

In 1509, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, writing from the restless perch of Thomas More’s London house, composed The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) in the span of roughly a week. The book was a satirical grenade lobbed at the Church, at the academy, at every strutting peacock of European intellectual life who mistook plumage for substance. Among its many surgical observations, one line has outlived them all with terrifying accuracy: “The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity, and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools to applaud them.”