Herbert Hoover and Moral Engineering

Yesterday (October 3, 2025), Heidi and I visited the Hoover–Minthorn House in Newberg, Oregon. The house, built in 1881 by Jesse Edwards, the Quaker founder of Newberg, stands behind a white picket fence, its clapboard walls repainted in pale yellow.  Murray Rothbard had already set my prejudice against Hoover, so the visit was a sardonicContinue reading “Herbert Hoover and Moral Engineering”

Gholas and the Eternal Golden Braid

On September 30, 2025, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University announced they had developed functional eggs from human skin cells. Immediately, I thought of Frank Herbert’s gholas. Duncan Idaho is the most-reborn man in Dune. From his first appearance on Arrakis, he is marked as archetype: Swordmaster of Ginaz, sensual, loyal, utterly alive. (JasonContinue reading “Gholas and the Eternal Golden Braid”

The Demographic Shadow

In my 2022 post on Soylent Green, I traced how the film’s revelation, “Soylent Green is people,” dramatically literalized overpopulation as self‑consumption, a horror that lingers because it feels both absurd and, from an ecological perspective, plausible. That image was a cultural zygote: mutating into other forms of demographic dread across decades. In 2025, weContinue reading “The Demographic Shadow”