Books
a deep physics of finance
The global economic crisis that started in 2008 has summoned a deeper skepticism of the economic mainstream with its corresponding prognostications for endless growth and prosperity. Individuals are starting to question the need to play on the giant wheels of churning money that represented the retirement funds and investments of the past. While I’ve been [...]
the aliens we’ve been looking for might just be inside us
Graham Hancock is the king of speculation. His books will either convince you there’s a lot more to human history or make you scoff at his possibly outlandish ideas. Regardless, it is damn entertaining. One of the first books I ever bought was his Fingerprints of the Gods (1996) which discussed how anomalies associated with [...]
living through a superpower’s collapse
If there’s one thing about the inevitable decline of the United States that gives me some bit of deeper comfort, its that people like Dmitry Orlov have been writing about it for a long time. His article, Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century was first released in 2005 and clearly Orlov had been thinking about [...]
at last, a realistic vision of the future
The men of affairs who treat the arts as amenities and dismiss philosophies as worthless abstraction, spend their workdays unknowingly mouthing the words of dead philosophers and acting out poems they have not read on the stage of current events. – John Michael Greer If industrial society turns out to have been little more than [...]
another solution to being human
With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence [...]
end of the coal age
Regardless of the consequences of peaking oil extraction rates, coal is the often overlooked driver of global economic growth. Coal provides the majority of the electricity responsible for our way of life and for consistent industrial production, around 49% of the electricity generated in the US comes from coal. When I worked for a coal-based [...]
a history of alien human interaction
The history of the human race is full of anomalous phenomena but no one set of border experiences has captured the attention of paranormal investigators more than the alleged interactions between members our species and those of the extraterrestrial. Since the modern UFO era broke open in 1947 after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of an unidentified [...]
confronting collapse
I first learned of Mike Ruppert through a chilling trailer for his then upcoming movie, Collapse. Ruppert has a long history as an investigative journalist that began when he broke away from the mainstream after his excellence in the LA police led him to be actively recruited by the CIA for running cocaine through South-Central [...]
the physics of the impossible inspire a sense of wonder
It is not a stretch to say that Michio Kaku is singularly responsible for my undergraduate major in Physics. Back in 2004, the shiny cover on the front of Parallel Worlds led me to promptly purchase the book as I walked into a bookstore in Concord, NC. Inside those pages were a rich description of [...]
Chris Anderson’s Free is Gee Whiz economics
Chris Anderson’s follow up to his revolutionary The Long Tail (2006, Hyperion) has me reminded of Thomas Friedman for geeks. Stuff that people younger than 25 get naturally but that CEOs and VCs can read and say, “wow, that internets is so amazing!” Free (2009, Hyperion) sets out to cover new ground in describing the [...]
