Supervillain State

If any single nation state today has completely dropped the pretense of a social contract, North Korea counts. The fact it's a got state-sponsored organized crime syndicate or two is just the tip of the iceberg.

Creative Annihilation

Sometimes, a force comes that simply utterly annihilates and obliterates what came before it. More often, it is a slow and gradual process as a status quo adapts and readapts to a new balance of powers. Other times, however, it can be a single, overwhelming force that truly is the stuff of legend and nightmare alike.

Destruction events can provide a clean slate, and not just in human history. Mass extinctions in Earth history usher in new types of dominant life, from dinosaurs and the age of mammals. Native Americans were nearly annihilated by European diseases, while colonists would swoop in to seize the freed real estate.

The destruction occurs when the ability of a system to adjust is overwhelmed by its ability to respond and reform, when the body fails to the pathogen. From barbarian invasions to plague biology, natural selection tends to favor the adaptive. While more specialized animals (the fastest, the smartest, the strongest, etc.) may die off, the common types endure. Compare machinery that can be built in caves to an over-complicated piece of crap. However, once the initial shock is gone, specialization occurs again. Such is a natural process of biology and economics alike. The lesson, however, is to have backups in case the over-specialized and delicate things fail. Because they will.

Brinksmanship: Applied Supervillainy

Due to American political dysfunction, the government shutdown is a thing. While there have been shutdowns before, there are almost always overhyped. It is ironic that such a system promotes brinksmanship, as opposed to reasoned debate. Such is a symptom of dysfunction.

A Handful of Dust

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." -T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

A recent technology shows a way of (relatively) non-invasively modifying brain. Imagine if microparticles were manufactured and covered in proteins that allow it to bypass the blood brain barrier after consuming it orally. Couple that with a hat-mounted transducer, and you'd possibly have a way to zap the pain and pleasure centers of the brain (amongst other ones). From there, Pavlovian conditioning could turn one into a nearly zombie-like servant. What could possibly go wrong?