This piece draws together ideas emerging from recent conversations with some of the most compelling monetary thinkers around — most prominently Brent Johnson and Michael Every. What I find particularly striking is that the USD stablecoin thesis explored here isn't confined to one corner of the ideological map. Thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis, coming from a … Continue reading The Imperial Circle Returns: Are USD Stablecoins America’s Next Monetary Weapon?
Tag: Meaning Crisis
Triffin’s Dilemma: A Fundamental Frame for Understanding and Navigating Our Time
One of the bedrock principles in my sensemaking toolbox is simple: Always determine the role of mechanical, deterministic causality before imputing human motivation or making moral judgments. In practical terms, this means asking a prior question before doing any moral or political analysis: What would happen here even if no one were trying to make … Continue reading Triffin’s Dilemma: A Fundamental Frame for Understanding and Navigating Our Time
The Axis Mundi; How an Ancient Symbol Still Reveals Integrity, Meaning, and What Endures
At the foundation of premodern symbolic thought lies a simple but profound intuition: reality is experienced as the meeting of heaven and earth. This claim is easily misunderstood by modern readers, who are accustomed to treating such language as a primitive attempt at cosmology. But symbolic language was never primarily an explanation of physical mechanisms. … Continue reading The Axis Mundi; How an Ancient Symbol Still Reveals Integrity, Meaning, and What Endures
The Accuser and the Embracer; Two deaths, two spirits, and the deepest story ever told
As the Orthodox Christian artist and thinker Jonathan Pageau is wont to say, “Symbolism happens!” Symbolism, he explains, “is not so much an arbitrary allegorical representation of something, but rather the very pattern by which we notice meaning.” Sitting by the fire in the predawn pall of this bitter Minnesota winter, I found myself gazing … Continue reading The Accuser and the Embracer; Two deaths, two spirits, and the deepest story ever told
Between Federal Scylla and Local Charybdis; State Coercion, Civic Abdication, and the Fragility of Freedom
UPDATE: 12:53 p.m., Sunday, January 25, 2026 I originally published this piece just before 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 23, 2026. Barely thirteen hours later—just after 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, January 24—37-year-old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was shot to death by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent near the intersection of … Continue reading Between Federal Scylla and Local Charybdis; State Coercion, Civic Abdication, and the Fragility of Freedom
The Sacred Hierarchy of Value: A Portal of Renewal in a Disenchanted Age
Listen: Speechify Audio Link Introduction In this post, I am going to attempt to articulate a perspective that, over the last eight years, has matured from a tiny seed to a deeply rooted, life-changing, and still vigorously growing personal reality. I remember vividly the first faint tremor—the prelude to the quake that would upend a … Continue reading The Sacred Hierarchy of Value: A Portal of Renewal in a Disenchanted Age
Deliberative Dad 