John Steppling

"Well, the news of the saucer been a-flyin' around I'm the only one that seen it on the ground First thing I seen when I saw it land Cats jumped out and they formed a band [Chorus] Flyin' saucer rock and roll, flyin' saucer rock and roll I couldn't understand the things they said But that crazy beat just a stopped me dead." Billy Lee Riley (Flying Saucer Rock n Roll, 1957 SUN records) "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Peter Thiel (Cato Unbound) “Dollars and cents? I don’t know. I want to do this job because I don’t know. It’s research. It’s pioneering. What’s the moon? Another North Pole, another South Pole. Why go there? We’ll let you know when … [Read more...]

"At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around." Nilay Patel (The People Do Not Yearn for Automation, 2026) “The first cycle of myth is the creation myth. Here the mythological projection of psychic material appears in cosmogonic form, as the mythology of creation. The world and the unconscious predominate and form the object of myth. Ego and man are only nascent as yet, and their birth, suffering, and … [Read more...]

"Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means hinders him from exploiting it." Karl Marx (Capital, Vol 1) "Language was dis-covered as its metaphysical cover was dissolved. Marx begins by noting that metaphysics is language concealed: ‘The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.’" Harry Redner (The Ends of Philosophy) "What another person is thinking, believing or feeling is … [Read more...]

“How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?” was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic’s democratic constitution. " Ana Teixeira Pinto (E Flux, Male Fantasies: The Sequel) "The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the … [Read more...]

"The father society has collapsed. It's not so much that the father doesn't talk or pay support or has left the house, but rather that the image of the working, teaching father has faded from the mind. An image that has existed brightly in the mind for thousands of years has faded." Robert Bly (Forward to Society Without a Father Alexander Mitscherlich ) “Sometimes a man stands up during supper And walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, Because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him, as if he were dead.” Rainer Marie Rilke (Sometimes a Man, Bly tr.) "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ... is my destroyer." Dylan … [Read more...]

"Freedom … ? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch him the moment he shows he is not one of them." D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature) "As the descendants of the Puritans and other godly Protestants, they will submit to religious teaching, but as Republicans they will have no priestcraft. … They say their prayers, and then seem to apologize for doing so, as though it were hardly the act of a free and … [Read more...]

"For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence." 1 Corinthians 26;29 "Although the power of making visible the forms of the dead has been claimed for one sort of incense only, the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in … [Read more...]

"When Hegel was lying on his deathbed," teased Heinrich Heine, "he said: 'Only one man has understood me,' but shortly afterwards he added fretfully: 'And even he did not understand me.' " Heinrich Heine (Religion and Philosophy in Germany) “...the ideas are stars, in contrast to the sun of revelation. They do not appear in the daylight of history; they are at work in history only invisibly. They shine only into the night of nature. Works of art, then, may be defined as the models of a nature that awaits no day, and thus no Judgment Day; they are the models of a nature that is neither the theater of history nor the dwelling place of mankind. The redeemed night.” Walter Benjamin … [Read more...]