If such fundamental deceptions, such as the USA President is 'a Russian agent' or Ukraine is 'the beacon of democracy', becloud the voting public, how secure are our political institutions, our halls of public reason, or our means of public choice?
This week was the beginning of the next stage in my new life, la vita nuova as an independent author. After a ritual week on the liminal beauty of the Bay of Lorne in South-Eastern Australia, I transformed from a government official, wounded and now retired, to become an independent author.
I wrote this essay on the renunciation of the political world in 2019. It is even more true today as well all face our world we cannot control and choices about how to husband and not derange our minds and the gardens of our culture. I was editing it for my next collection of essays, Thirteen... Continue Reading →
I have published From the Burning Archive: essays and fragments 2015-2022. You can buy it as print or e-book here at Amazon and also at other online retailers. Here is an excerpt of the introductory essay of that collection. It tells how a dream image became a poem became a blog became a podcast and then an author platform.
Does the history of the mafia have more to do with Italian Risorgimento politics, prisons and the disruptions of the nineteenth century than medieval brotherhoods?
The Russians with Attitude podcast released to their subscribers a feature this week on the Russian writer and mystic, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov made his way from a medical student in Kiev through the Civil War in Russia and Ukraine to a difficult life as a writer for newspapers, theatre and novels in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote a great account of the Civil War in The White Guard, and of course the masterpiece for which he earned posthumous fame, The Master and Margarita. [Read more]....
"Everyone was dreaming, ruminating, full of foreboding, feeling his way." (Nikolai Sukhanov on February 1917 Russian Revolution). Does this not feel a lot like us today? Do we all not feel the world is unfolding in surprising directions, and among our more difficult tasks is to feel our own way through these events?
We are not entering World War III, I think, I hope, I insist on believing. But we are entering the final phase of the Hundred Years Cold War of the Anglo-American Powers against Russia. My forecast is that the system of power that has led this war will collapse, perhaps surprisngly quickly, but likely over five to ten years. Seven great fault lines are cracking open during the Ukraine crisis that will shape the social, political, cultural and international orders we navigate through.
Journalists draft history? The public sphere, Habermas and the post-democratic society. Emmanuel Todd on the tasks ahead for advanced societies. History as a moral art that encounters the living past in an infinite conversation.
Omricon, fear and crowd psychology. Jay Bhattacharya and the catastrophic errors of public health. Grieving memories of Stuart Macintyre. Szymborska on what matters. Paul Kingsnorth on fear, tyranny and the vaccine wars. Elena Shvarts on both hopelessness and hope.
Evil triads and power. Will the West decouple from America? Mattias Desmet and mass formation psychosis. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Troubadors and Pound's Cantos.
Robert Lowell on George Santayana. The silence of the doctors and the rule of public health. Virus gonna virus. Jordan B. Peterson on saying no to tyranny. The exposure of the RussiaGate and Steele dossier hoax. On prophecy. Bhagavad Gita and the sacrifice of the soul in the fire of the Gods.
The Burning Archive 