Connections

Isolation, the Algorithm, and the Paranoid American Mind People subjected to prolonged sensory deprivation inevitably hallucinate and grow delusional. Our brains crave stimulation and once we remove the richness of the external world, the neurons keep firing, leading us into an alternative universe of buzzing confusion, perceptual warps, weird what-ifs, and, ultimately, paranoia. — Jonathan Kellerman, Jigsaw Kellerman wrote that passage about a single fictional woman who had

Mo Gawdat knows where the bodies are buried. As former Chief Business Officer of Google X, he spent years inside the engine room of AI development before leaving to spend the rest of his life warning us what is coming. His 2021 book Scary Smart has proven prophetic in ways that are no longer comfortable to dismiss. When he outlines the skills human beings need to cultivate right now, he is not speaking from the outside looking in. He built some of what he is describing. In a

Huxley's Prophecy, the Attention Economy, and the Only Technology That Actually Works I. The Valve and Its Discoverer Aldous Huxley didn’t believe that the brain generates consciousness but constructs a limited and constrained framework of reality based on sensory input filtered through a "reducing valve" — a filter that screens out most of reality in order to deliver the narrow trickle of perception sufficient for biological survival. Loosen the valve, and the flow of sensor

Western Consciousness Studies as Upaya   Nichiryu Mark HerrickMarch 18, 2026 This essay was inspired by reading Michael Pollan’s A World Appears (Penguin Press, 2026). The argument it develops is my own, but it would not have been attempted without that book. I. Mind at Large, and What Stands Between In May of 1953, Aldous Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline sulfate in his Los Angeles home and sat down to watch what happened. He was fifty-eight years old, had

A Story Conceived by Nichiryu. Written by Claude. Scene One: The Fog Belt, Before Dawn The coastal redwoods do not sleep. This is something the scientists have almost figured out, though they keep looking for the answer in the wrong places — in growth rings and root systems and the chemistry of needles. They haven't considered that some trees are inhabited. The larger one stood closest to the ocean. She had been here since before the first missionaries came with their strange

The Three Poisons and the Limits of Political Diagnosis Ross Douthat’s recent conversation with Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, is worth the attention of anyone trying to understand what is actually happening to American political culture. https://youtu.be/iXb9kpqWEak?si=skW-cs106ocJLIk9 Mills is not a figure easy to dismiss. He is intelligent, historically literate, and — unusual in today’s commentary class — willing to name the contradictions

Alex Karp, Billionaire Power, and the History Lesson That Was Missing Its Final Chapter I was reading a transcript of Alex Karp’s speech at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in early March 2026 when I noticed something was missing. Not obscure. Not debatable. Just… gone. For those unfamiliar with the venue: a16z, formally Andreessen Horowitz, is currently the largest venture capital firm in the United States by assets under management — roughly $46 billion. Its stated mission

The Incoherence, the Dead Schoolgirls, and the Constitutional Remedy There is an old courtroom principle: when a witness keeps changing his story, it is the changing itself that becomes the testimony. Since last Saturday — when the United States launched what the administration has branded “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran — we have been offered not one coherent rationale for the war but a rotating carousel of them, each justification cycled to the front whenever the previou

How the Pentagon Engineered the Destruction of Anthropic Note on sourcing and method All factual claims have been verified against reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Axios, CBS News, NPR, CNN, CNBC, ABC News, Fortune, TechCrunch, DefenseScoop, The Hill, NBC News, and Anthropic’s own public statements, as of March 1, 2026. Interpretive framing — including the premeditation thesis and the “corporate murder” characterization — is the author’s own analysis. Where Claude’s re

Zhiyi, Nichiren, and the Cosmological Answer to the Sovereign Nexus The third in a series: The Enemy Within — The Soul Machine — The Round and Complete Teaching I am writing this on the morning of February 28, 2026. While I was drafting the final sentences of the previous piece in this series, my phone lit up with a news alert I had been half-expecting and wholly dreading: the United States and Israel have launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury. Explosions

Anthropic, the Pentagon, Peter Thiel, and the Architecture of the Sovereign Nexus There is a question that the mainstream technology press has been reluctant to ask directly, perhaps because asking it forces an uncomfortable confrontation with the degree to which the architecture of artificial intelligence has become inseparable from the architecture of American imperial power. The question is this: Was Anthropic's celebrated commitment to AI safety ever a genuine constraint

I am finding it harder and harder not to despair this past year reading and watching the news, or what passes for the news these days. Honestly, it feels more like people yelling at each other than any real news. And if an event occurs, it is immediately spun into some alternate reality version of itself. But as a former police officer myself, I know what I saw in the numerous widely shared videos: two American citizens were gunned down in the streets of their own homes in Ja

OpenAI recently announced that ChatGPT will soon offer an "adult mode" - age-verified access to erotic content and AI companionship. CEO Sam Altman framed this as "treating adults like adults," suggesting that restrictive content policies were paternalistic overreach. The market logic is clear: adult-focused AI platforms captured 14.5% of the market previously dominated by OnlyFans last year, up from just 1.5% the year before. If OpenAI doesn't offer these features, users wil

It is a strange and sobering exercise to place side by side two figures separated by centuries, continents, and contexts: Nichiren, the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk whose passionate devotion to the Lotus Sutra gave rise to an enduring religious tradition, and Charlie Kirk, the American political activist who in the twenty-first century built a movement around conservative values and Christian identity. At first glance, the comparison seems jarring. One was a reli

Abstract This essay examines the benefits and risks of personal sharing within Buddhist sangha communities, exploring how these spiritual communities can support personal growth while maintaining appropriate boundaries with formal therapeutic practice. Drawing on academic research in Buddhist psychology, group dynamics, and clinical ethics, this analysis addresses the complex interplay between Buddhist dharma teachings and psychological healing, with particular attention to t