In these increasingly surrealistic times, public discourse is highly focused on trying to discern which political leaders, public figures, influencers and billionaires are Good and which ones are Bad. To […]
Category: New in Old Light
Empire of Distrust
Centuries ago, the Italian philosopher and priest Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote, “Good can exist without evil, whereas evil can not exist without good.” The good does not need evil, it […]
The Last Analyst
In the ever-fascinating realm of information, where anything from timeless wisdom to the analysis of current events is flowing or contained, those who have the most important things to say […]
The Daily Boycott
The boycott is incredibly powerful as a means to dismantle and undermine anything unrighteous. It has been a few years since I have spent a euro at the big blue […]
Skies and Limits
Among the participants of an international conference in the Belgian city of Ghent in May 2010, it was well known that the modification of cirrus clouds had been ongoing for […]
The Memetic Heretics
Memetics, the science of information flows, existed long before the internet, but a Belgian court went against long-held knowledge when it sentenced a group of digital Memetic Heretics last week. […]
‘Davos Men’ and ‘Dead Souls’: 20 Years Later
Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite was an essay published twenty years ago by Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008), a prominent political scientist who taught at Harvard University. One […]
Computer Still Says No
Humor is often prophetic. The sketch from Little Britain –‘Computer says No’– is exactly twenty years old. An unfriendly, cold-hearted hospital receptionist conveniently suspends all of her humanity and responsibility […]
The Modern Hero
Last week a Dutch biography of the murdered artist Theo van Gogh (1957-2004) was published. Even after seven years of work, his biographer admitted in a television interview that he […]
The Triviality Trap
In our world today the good needs strengthening through resistance, protection and creation. The bad needs closure through demolition, justice and learning. The past needs reexamination and the future needs […]
The End of Short-Term Thinking
All institutions and companies have short-term thinkers and long-term thinkers. Short-term thinking is the prioritization of obvious, easy gains over lasting value; it is a form of self-sabotage and short-sightedness. […]
The Conditionality Curse
Freedom is the absence of conditionality. In this industrial, mechanical, technical era, however, conditionality is the ever-expanding center of existence. All of our appliances and software revolve around the concept […]
Between Coincidence and Conspiracy
There is one specific article by Edward Snowden that has been inspiring me since its publication in August 2021. It’s called Apophenia – How the Internet Transforms the Individual into […]
It’s Human Nature?
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed […]
Building the Non-Lie
It’s harder than it seems to build a truthful venture atop the ruins of a World of Lies. Whoever has had the courage to start such a new venture is […]
Myths and Constitutions
Freedom and power are oftentimes inversely related, similar to the way social norms and moral codes can be inversely related. In times like these, when causes and consequences are continuously […]
Dutch Debate is Dead
Debate Remains Dead. And They’ve Killed It. A popular song about the Covid restrictions was ‘We’ve Lost Dancing’ in 2021. In The Netherlands, we certainly lost much dancing during these […]
Assumptions are Dangerous
Especially for the Targets of PsyOps: You & Me Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — […]
Revenge of the Epistemologists
How to Acquire Knowledge? What can we know? Perhaps not an uncontroversial question nowadays, yet an important one. Right after his speech at the Heritage Foundation Tucker Carlson said that, […]
Dutch Media’s Unforced Errors
Balancing the Scales after Deceit A law of nature dictates that energy always tries to balance itself, like a scale that’s always moving to the middle, which is the most […]
The Deafening Silence of Columbia Journalism School
Maybe I missed the memo. I sure hope I did. Maybe there are groups of journalists trained by my alma mater, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York […]
De ‘hamsterwiel’-jaren
Waar ging het mis? Zal het straks mis gaan, is het al mis gegaan, of allebei? Voormalig econoom en oud-werknemer van Lehman Brothers Michael Krieger, @Libertyblitz op Twitter, omschreef laatst […]
From Ponzi to Ponzi
I met Bernie Madoff at a party in Florida. It was just a year or so before December 2008, when he got arrested and began his 150 years in jail […]