Amerika-in-Exile (the Tulio Baars Homepage)

Nature puts limits on every species. Most, if they grow too fast, will eat themselves out of food and die off. Others become too powerful and end up becoming prey for other species. Still others self-destruct simply by dominating their environment so much that they fail to adapt to it, at which point they drift into irrelevance and cannot react to changes in their environment. Humanity has a built-in limiter: all of our civilizations destroy themselves once they get too powerful. Up until now, this has kept us from tearing up the planet, but with technology (notably the internal combustion engine) we beat the odds, it seemed. Now we realize that we are not safe from our own suicidal pathology, but instead, will just experience a harder fail as our societies disintegrate. In our case, this pathology begins when we become individualistic, or prioritize ourselves over the larger order. We can have only one: either our goal and measurement of the world is the self, or it is an order ...

We know a lot about Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed fifty-eight people at a Las Vegas concert with bump stocks and semiautomatic rifles, but the pattern makes so little sense that we know nothing at all of the man himself. In fact, it seems as if he went out of his way to obfuscate his own life before going on what he surely knew was a suicide mission. And now, the media narrative emerges in its final form : A jailed man who gave a statement to authorities in November said he encountered a man he believed was Stephen Paddock and who told him that Federal Emergency Management Agency “camps” setup after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin' down doors and...confiscating guns.” “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man said Paddock told him less than a month before the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” These statemen...