I have written about this many times, but I don't think I have ever written a whole article about it. If I am, indeed, repeating myself, my apologies to my long-time readers. That said, it deserves repeating.

Let me first explain what I mean by "top-down and bottom-up." I use this phrase often in my psychotherapy work. I believe most therapy is designed to be top-down. This is where symptoms are treated, but not the cause of the symptoms. The first culprit on this list is typical psychiatry, where a 15-minute assessment determines a diagnosis, and a diagnosis determines medication protocol. If this modality of mental illness treatment worked, it would be an effective means of treatment. But like most things in life, determining the efficacy of this approach is not black and white; it actually does work in certain situations, for various reasons, but doesn't in others.

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Some of the serious mental illnesses, such as psychosis, suicidal depression, and mind-numbing anxiety, treating the symptoms will often quell what is considered pathological about the underlying disease. It still doesn't cure the cause, but it keeps the person contained, non-violent, so they don't hurt others, and stable enough that they can proceed with a life that otherwise would be impossible to pursue.

There is also the placebo effect, which very often is the prime reason people seem to get better. Then, of course, there are the people who are taking their prescribed drug and also going to psychotherapy. If they feel better, they will invariably point to the drug as the reason, rather than the therapy — that seems a more scientific approach.

I could go on with this, but I don't want to crowd the article. Top-down methods are not limited to psychiatry; we see them in regular talk therapy as well. Treating the symptoms rather than the root cause is the primary approach of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). To be fair, there are certainly legitimate success stories with this method. However, if we continue feeding the monster (the underlying cause) through our aberrant behaviour, it will continue to wreak havoc. But if we simply stop the symptom (the behaviour) we can, over time, often kill the monster — if it is weak or small enough. So CBT can be successful, but more likely than not, we merely put the monster to sleep, only for it to raise its ugly head again once the CBT tactics cease.

The parents of California high school track athlete Reese Hogan did something no parent should have to do. They went to the press to ask why Gov. Gavin Newsom is fine letting a biological boy compete against their daughter for a girls' title. Reese put in the hard work required for a girl to take home the title. Reese is the one who deserves the trophy. But in 2026, asking for a fair race makes you the troublemaker.

A few hundred miles up the coast, Nicki Minaj said she's done biting her tongue. Her California home keeps getting "swatted," and Newsom's office hasn't lifted a finger. She accuses Jay-Z and Roc Nation of trying to destroy her career.

To be clear, Minaj has made choices and taken positions many conservative Christians wouldn't endorse. But that's precisely what makes this so revealing. Even someone who once fit in so comfortably within an elite cultural crowd can be cast out the moment she refuses total ideological conformity. She has become a whistleblower of what many women already knew: The woke crowd celebrates women only as long as they stay compliant. The second you deviate from the approved script, you're on your own.

Drawing on Copernican tradition, philosophers argue for plausibility of other kinds of sentient life.
Does consciousness depend on flesh and blood?

The answer is almost certainly no, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.

In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, assert that consciousness is likely possible in life forms made of much different stuff. Think of the five-limbed alien with a rock-like exterior in the recent blockbuster movie "Project Hail Mary."
Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness; they proceed from the heuristic premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon. Instead, they ask a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?

The paper comes at a time when the question of conscious artificial intelligence looms large, fueling dreams and nightmares. The authors, who touch just briefly on the matter, do not take a firm position either way — and, in fact, diverge in their views. But the arguments they advance leave open the possibility that AI could be conscious, though perhaps not in its current form.

At the heart of the paper's argument is the philosophical notion of "substrate flexibility." A property, such as the ability to hold water, is substrate flexible if it can be achieved with different kinds of materials. For example, a cup can be made of glass or plastic, a book can be printed on paper or stored electronically, and music can be encoded on vinyl records or servers.

Consciousness, Schwitzgebel and Pober argue, is also substrate flexible.

"The universe may contain minds stranger than we can imagine," Schwitzgebel said.

Texting while driving. Bullying people on social media. Buying into the latest conspiracy theory. Passing off AI-generated work as your own.

That may seem like a random list of 21st-century vices. But I'd argue they're all examples of the loss of one particular virtue: sophrosyne.

An ancient Greek concept, sophrosyne - pronounced "suh-fros-uh-nee" - is what we might call "sound-mindedness" today. It's a constellation of characteristics, including moderation, reflectiveness and self-knowledge. They're found in the kind of person who can respect and trust herself, and be respected and trusted by others.

As a philosopher and philosophical counselor, I research the connection between virtue and happiness. In particular, I've noticed a connection between sophrosyne and eudaimonia, the Greek philosophical concept for happiness, or living well.

Another admirable human trait that has gone the way of the Dodo. It certainly disappeared from my life early on — if it was ever there to begin with. If I had to pick the number one thing that has gotten in the way of my goals, I'd say it's the lack of discipline. For me, it hasn't been a total lack, but it's right up there at the top of the list.

So, exactly what is discipline? A simplistic way to define it would be this: practicing discipline means consistently doing something that doesn't bring immediate pleasure, but in the end delivers the goals you actually want. And here comes instant gratification again — that evil little trickster that seems to be Public Enemy Number One these days.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the marshmallow experiment. Conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University, it tested delayed gratification in preschool-aged children. A kid was left alone in a room with one marshmallow (or sometimes a cookie or pretzel). They could eat it right away, or wait 15-20 minutes for the researcher to return and get two marshmallows instead. Some kids ate it immediately. Others distracted themselves, covered their eyes, or sang songs to resist.

Follow-up studies over decades showed that the children who waited longer tended to have better life outcomes: higher SAT scores, better educational attainment, lower BMI, and fewer issues with impulsivity or addiction later on. It wasn't perfect science — later replications questioned how strongly it predicted success — but the core idea holds: the ability to resist immediate temptation for a bigger future reward matters.

The important thing to note is that this was done with children. As adults, we're supposed to know better — wait, be patient, stay disciplined, and reap greater rewards. Ha ha. I'm sure when I was a kid, I would've scarfed the first marshmallow, and now, if they replaced it with cookies, I'd do the exact same thing.

The Vatican just declared a global emergency. Tucker Carlson called the President the Antichrist. A historian who infiltrated a UN-connected mystery school explains what you are watching unfold.

According to the oldest surviving mythology on earth, kings did not rule alone. Each one had a demon assigned to him. The Sumerians called them Apkallu. They were divine counselors, and they whispered in the ear of the ruler. I am a historian who studied inside a UN-connected mystery school. This is what I have spent a decade learning about what you are watching.

The word "museum" comes from the Greek mouseion: a temple where spirits entered the people who came seeking knowledge. Homer did not write the Iliad. He asked a goddess to possess him and use his voice. The opening line is the request: "Sing, O goddess."

Everyone is using the word possessed lately. The more popular term, as of late, has been "Demonic Transfer Technology." They say it like a metaphor. What if there is a pragmatic, even scientific, explanation for what appears to be the demonic possession of our global leaders?

Imagine the following message in a public space:


I have never seen a sign bearing the above message in any public space, nor do I want to. Similarly, I have never seen a sign near a heavily African American neighborhood that says:

"Caution, entering an area in which your chances of being the victim of a violent crime are statistically proven to be much higher than in other places."

And again, I do not want to.

My reasons for not wanting to ever read these things are, or should be, self-evident to any reasonably thoughtful person: it is never permissible in a society that purports to be democratic to have the state apparatus cast moral aspersions upon an entire subset of the culture on the basis of that subset's immutable characteristics.

And yet, in many municipalities in the US and Europe there is a trend toward posting signs in public transport that, in various levels of explicitness, point toward all men as being gropers and harassers in potencia.

I was out with a friend for lunch the other day (yeah, I still have a few of those left). This friend leans more to the liberal side of things.

He certainly doesn't care for Trump, is a vax advocate, etc. A very nice guy, I have to say — a superb artist, an excellent father, and just a good all-around person. I won't go off on a tangent here, but sheep types are typically not bad people.

They are just like us, only asleep. Anyway, I digress.

Needless to say, our conversation focused on music and other safe subjects and didn't venture into the dark zone of world politics, public health, and the like. But he did say one thing that got me thinking. It's something you hear often, and usually when you hear it, the person saying it is rather livid. They just can't believe it, and they present it as if it is one of the main reasons the world is going to shit.

"Why does everyone think they are an expert and run off at the mouth all of the time? Why can't they just shut up and listen to the people who know what they're talking about?"

Quite frankly, I hear this from shrew and sheep alike (though more from sheep, actually — at least they seem more angry about it than shrews do).

In France, when 19-year-old Clélia Verdier woke up from a medically induced coma, her first instinct was to ask for her three daughters. Instead, doctors shattered the reality she had been living in: the children had never existed.

Verdier, from Lyon in France, had slipped into a coma in June 2025 after what she described to the Daily Mail as a "serious suicide attempt by taking a large amount of medication". She remained in a medically induced coma for three weeks — but inside her mind, an entirely different life unfolded.

Unaware that she was unconscious, Verdier experienced what she described as "extremely intense" dreams and nightmares that became indistinguishable from reality. Among them was a vivid and emotional journey of becoming a mother.

Eisenhower warned us: "Beware the military-industrial complex." Those words are widely remembered. Less so the companion warning: "Holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite."

That second warning may prove the more prophetic. The convergence of those two forces - the industrial machinery of power and the technological elite capable of shaping reality itself - is where we now find ourselves.

The AI singularity is typically described as the point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, triggering an uncontrollable "intelligence explosion." At this tipping point, AI becomes capable of recursive self-improvement...designing smarter versions of itself...leading to rapid, unpredictable, and profound and irreversible change in human civilization. We are told this is imminent.