Actually, this will be a combo of the series beginning and a newsletter. Newsletter part first: Between WordPress and MailChimp, something has happened to the way the images are presented, and that, in turn, distorted the text, causing it to be trimmed for some readers. I have it sent to myself a few different ways, and I saw it displayed in three ways, only one of which was easy to read.

Splattering figures like Bill Gates, Jean-Luc Godard and Bernard-Henri Lévy, he perfected the art of using whipped cream as a form of protest.

Contemporary archaeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule. What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

In his new book “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” journalist Gil Durán warns that tech billionaires are attempting to overthrow American democracy - a movement that’s ...

It is increasingly clear that our current approach to nature, our culture, ourselves, and each other is not working. We’re a species that's 250-300 thousand years old. New assumptions slowly baked into our worldview over the last five thousand (1-2% of our full species-span), such as that of unending progress or the perfection of our species, worked well in the short term but are now a liability.

unidentified youths with beer This article is dedicated to my brothers and sisters in the Madison High School class of 1970. As a result of my recent dive into Bronze Age archeology, I have learned some interesting facts about beer. The first is that modern chemical analysis and genetic testing can actually determine what was in 5000 year old beverages. The second is that beer was a lot weirder 5000 years ago.

This article builds on a previous: Sharp Joy: emotion, two communities, a slow-rolling book report, and some reflection. That article looks at some projects I'm involved in and then considers how we behave in natural disasters. It uses Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters to add general insight. The quotation below used in that article is a good summary of where the article lands.

Embedded below is the deck for a presentation I gave at Solarpunkification 2026 in San Francisco. It looks at some projects I'm involved in, and then gets into the psychological side of our response to disasters. That last point will be the jumping-off point for a piece I'm working on, so I'll need this for reference and wanted to add it....read it into the record, as it were.

The mystifying Minoan structure, unearthed on a hilltop in Crete, is one of 35 newly announced archaeological finds in the area

YouTube video by RAWarchive

Folks have been making up shit about the Minoans for 3000 years. My turn:-) We’re on vacation in Crete, chosen because of a long-term fascination with the Minoan civilization. The attraction: a well-developed pre-patriarchal Goddess-worshiping civilization with fascinating art— art unlike anything that followed in Greece or Rome. Minoan pottery shows few, if any, battles, for example. Greek pottery, beginning shortly after the Minoans, is rife with them.

Basically, Trump screwed up a national monument and a balanced ecology.

This is a single reference point for Greek myths about Minoan Crete. Starting probably shortly after the Mycenaean takeover of Crete and altered and adapted thereafter (~1450 BCE onward to Roman consolidation of Greek content ~50 BCE), the myth of King Minos comes to us in the following form.

787 likes, 52 comments - pointreyes_prnsa on May 5, 2026: "Awkward! Fashion’s biggest night but it seems like these Met Gala attendees stole their looks straight from Point Reyes 👀 Of course we’re jo...

The ongoing evolution of reality

YouTube video by Jouer en conscience

As we move into an era of psychedelic-assisted therapy, it is time to honor the contribution of Susi Ramstein, the first trip sitter. Image is under Creative Commons by donDSTR This was published previously on Medium.com, 6/6/2024 Bicycle Day Bicycle Day, celebrated by the MAPS crowd, is an annual event that honors the first ingestion of LSD by Albert Hoffman, its discoverer, at Sandoz Labs in Basel, Switzerland, on April 19, 1943.