HBI Blog

The Case of the Sexual Cosmos.   The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong is Howard Bloom's latest book. Bloom takes us on a grand journey from the emergence of the first life, flowers, and all the way to stars and galaxies. Bloom...

Sex is not the shortest line between two points. In fact, it’s the longest line this cosmos has ever conceived. And the most twisted. Yet it pulls together the most astonishing things. Things of enormous power and scope.

In a story that appeared Wednesday morning, September 14th, The Wall Street Journal exposed a hidden crisis called the silver tsunami.

We are living in a radically different America than the one we lived in last week.   On Monday, July 1st, the Supreme Court rewrote the constitution to say that a president who commits criminal acts while in office may be immune from prosecution.  ...

On Tuesday, June 18th, a new word showed up in the vocabulary of the Middle-East war: “inevitable.”  Nearly every expert in Israel from the country’s military leaders to its newsletter writers said that an all-out war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was inevitable.  And who...

Is Happiness Just a Sip Away? What started as a marketing gimmick may have revealed something important about your happiness.  True Lemon is a product created in Baltimore in 2003 to put the flavor of a lemon slice into a powder that you can pour into your drink.  True Lemon is what its creator

There are new fears that the war in the Middle East between Hamas and Israel could spill over into a wider conflict. And there is reason to fear that, in the end, the conflict could go nuclear and kill us all.
Here’s what’s happened in the last few days.

A new survey from LendingTree, the online loan comparison service, looked at accident rates of 30 auto brands and found that the brand with the most accidents per 1,000 drivers was Tesla.

The Wall Street journal has published a story that may explain many of the mysteries of the war against Hamas in Gaza.

At 10:52 Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal reported new data from the National Center for Health Statistics on suicide in the United States. The data was shocking.

Israel has declared that it now has control over the biggest hospital in Gaza, a hospital built by an Israeli architect, al Shifa Hospital.

For thirty years, China has been building step by step toward a tipping point in the global balance of power. A tipping point that will allow it to take over. And to impose what it calls a New World Order.

Militant extremist Islam is showing its carefully hidden Nazism.

There’s a Muslim phrase you need to know if you’re going to understand the war in Gaza and Israel. It’s a phrase that militant Islamic Jihadists have used from Chechnya to Lebanon:

We all know what happened Saturday. Or we think we know.

Why are people acting so crazy these days?

The economic jackpot of space will dwarf the Internet, the automobile, and the Louisiana Purchase combined. Space mining will reap trillions. Scientific research done in space will cure countless diseases. Space Solar Power and space nuclear power will ensure American dominance of the global energy market for a century…  if America gets there first.

There’s a term that used to be applied to mass hysterias, a panic.  And we are in a social network panic. 
 
The Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, a man who normally stays in the shadows, has issued a 25-page advisory with 104 research references warning of “a profound risk of harm” to children and teenagers from social media. 

This is a story of the prizes and the prices of fame.

At 8:00 Wednesday morning, September 20th, Donald Trump Jr’s X account proclaimed,  “I’m sad to announce, my father Donald Trump has passed away. I will be running for president in 2024.”

In 1968 Pope Paul VI established a Global Peace Day. A New Year’s Day on which the Pope gives a speech “reflecting the signs of our times.” Wednesday August 9th, the Vatican put out an announcement about the speech the pope will give at next year’s Peace Day, coming up on January 1st, just four months from now.  The theme the pope will zero in on is “Artificial Intelligence and Peace.”

On Tuesday, September 13, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, came out of a subway station in central Tehran, walked through a park, and in that park was arrested by Iran’s Moral Security Police.

The morality policemen bundled her into their standard white and green Morality Patrol van. And, according to Amini’s family, they beat her.

At 9 am Moscow time Wednesday September 21, Vladimir Putin gave his first address to the Russian nation since he started his Ukraine war in February 2022.  The speech was shocking.  It revealed a worldview radically different from yours and mine. 

At 9 am Moscow time Wednesday September 21, Vladimir Putin gave his first address to the Russian nation since he started his Ukraine war in February 2022.  The speech was shocking.  It revealed a worldview radically different from yours and mine. 

Two new polls show that since the beginning of the Covid pandemic on March 11, 2020, some of us have had trouble sleeping.  There are two main things keeping us awake.  We are worried about the state of the world and its impact on us.  And our mate in the bed next to us is making sleep hard. 

First, let me give you the hidden bottom line of this story.  If you are a man or a boy, nature has cut your lifespan off at the knees.  Now for the news.

By Joshua Calkins Treworgy
(author of Motor City Shambler–Bob the Zombie Book 1)

On the morning of August 10th, in Aurora, Colorado, Margarita Flores Velasquez opened the door to her bathroom and discovered her 13 year old grandson, Jose, bent over with his head in the sink. She recalls, “I said ‘Jose, Jose,’… I tried moving him. He was limp, cold, his mouth and fingers were purple.”  She tried CPR and called 911.  It was no use.  Jose was dead. Dead on what was supposed to be his second day of 8th grade. 

The biggest danger of the Mar a Lago FBI intrusion is civil war. 
 
Here are the details.  At roughly ten in the morning  of Monday August 8th, a team of FBI agents entered the Trump mansion at Mar A Lago, went to a padlocked  room in the basement, and removed roughly a dozen boxes  of papers. 

An essay by Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy
Author of “A Hunter and His Prey”

Attention is the oxygen of the human soul.  A few of us who cannot gain attention by doing good will seek it by doing evil.

On Wednesday May 11th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that deaths from drug overdoses had reached an all-time high, almost 108,000 in the past twelve months. 

A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows that half of us Americans think the days of COVID waves are over. Only a third of us think we face a new wave of infections. Which group is right?

An essay by Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy

Author of “Motor City Shambler”

A crime is taking place before our very eyes. Three Supreme Court justices have committed perjury.

Russia has just cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, a potential death blow to these nations’ economies.  And Russia could easily do the same to Germany, the engine of the economy of Europe.

The fear of nuclear war has been in the air ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on March 24th. How real is the nuclear possibility?

If there is a decision to start an all-out nuclear war, that decision will take place in the mind of one man and one man only, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

On Monday, April 18th, a judge struck down the federal mandate requiring masks for travel. But five days earlier, the New York Times had come out with a report that made public travel sound suicidal and mask-wearing sound like a necessity. New York State, where I live, was the epicenter for a new coronavirus wave to beat all other waves.

A hopeful story in Bloomberg News November 20 proclaimed that “Kremlin Insiders [are] Alarmed Over [the] Growing Toll of Putin’s War in Ukraine.”

Dmitry Medvedev is the former president of Russia, the current deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, and is a mouthpiece for his boss, Vladimir Putin. So when Medvedev speaks, he gives insight into Putin’s mind.

According to a leading figure in the defense community, a retired general who prefers to remain anonymous, space can save us from the next Ukraine.

The story of nature and the story of life is not a tale of plants, animals, and humans living in harmony with their environment. It is not a tale of a blissful balance. It is not the story of a warm and loving equilibrium.

So far, the Ukraine war has barely touched your lifestyle and mine. But that could soon change. The change could come in four areas—your food, your electricity, your water, and your internet.

An essay by Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy

Author of “Roads Through Amelia”

Ride the Whirlwind – Climate Stabilization Technologies The highly respected British charitable agency to combat poverty, Oxfam, predicts that climate change will produce “a growing trend of… destructive climate disasters.” And in our previous chapter of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is

An essay by Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy
Author of “The Big Tour”

Opposites are joined at the hip. In our last episode, we watched nature use a single strategy that alternates between two opposites, thrift and extravagance. We saw this thrift versus extravagance strategy at work in the tiny, bug-like creatures called tardigrades Sometimes better known as water piglets or water bears. And we saw it at work in hummingbirds.

We are in a war with one man, Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin is nuclear.

A primer from Howard Bloom, who coined the term, Omnology “can help make you the person you
really want to be instead of the person squashed into existence by a bunch of disciplinary boundaries.

At the heart of sex are genes. It’s been over 70 years since we first detected genes, and we still know less than we think about how they work.

Is Vladimir Putin using a policy of what US and NATO officials call “slow annihilation”[i] on the Ukraine? And if he is, why is he doing it? Why are Putin’s troops performing what even Putin-lover Donald Trump calls a holocaust?[ii]
Vladimir Putin’s first week of war in the Ukraine did not

On February 24th, Russia attacked the Ukraine from three sides—the north, the south, and the east. Here’s the story behind that move.

By: Joshua Calkins Treworgy

“The war unfolding in the Ukraine is not a product of capitalism, patriarchy, or technology” says Howard Bloom, the man Britain’s Channel 4 TV calls the Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud of the 21st century.

On February 25th the Minneapolis alternative rock band Airship Caravan will release the first of a series of songs based on lyrics by Howard Bloom, the man Britain’s Channel 4 TV calls the Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud of the 21st Century.

Anne Boleyn gives Henry VIII a crowbar. And she finally gives him something else he has pursued for seven years.
Let’s go back to the role of sex in harnessing the hurricanes of history.

Western intelligence agencies believe that Russia is prepared to invade the Ukraine at any minute.

In a time when war seems imminent in the Ukraine, King’s Rest Records is releasing a video of its single Aeon of Light, made by British artist Planet Frog and based on a rant from England’s Channel 4 TV. The ranter is Howard Bloom, the man Channel 4 called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud of the 21st century, The impassioned sermon by Bloom preaches shutting out the gods of war.

On Wednesday, January 5th, Fox News Digital carried a headline saying that the, “Pope criticizes couples who adopt pets instead of children.” According to Fox, Pope Francis declared that, “”Today… we see a form of selfishness. We see that some people do not want to have a child. Sometimes they have one, and that’s it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of children.”

On the night of December 22, 2021, a company called TuSimple based in San Diego had a computer-driven, autonomous 18-wheel semi-trailer truck drive 80 miles at night from a rail yard in Tucson, Arizona, to a distribution center in Phoenix, Arizona. Without a human in the cab.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

What was the role of sex in the romance of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIIIth? Did their courtship do what Pierre Louis de Maupertuis decrees—finding the shortest distance between two points? Or did it do something far more ambitious? Did it create the longest distance between two points? Did it harness the hurricanes of history? Or, to put it differently, is the story of Anne and Henry simple and thrifty or expensive and complex? You be the judge.

Covid Lockdown Creates Blues
Covid is making people depressed, lonely, drug-addicted, and suicidal.

The most important story that you are not being told in the pages of the Washington Post or on CNN is unfolding at this minute on the border between Russia and the Ukraine. It’s a story that could easily lead to Word War III and a nuclear Armageddon. And our mainstream media is closing its eyes.

We are inching toward a possible World War III. A war on two fronts.

China’s Xi Jinping and Joe Biden met virtually for almost four hours on the night of Tuesday November 16th. They agreed to disagree. But the meeting lowered tensions. Temporarily.

For the first time, three branches of the US government–the US Space Force, the Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit, and the Air Force Research Laboratory–have issued a report together, the 2021 State of the Space Industrial Base Report. And that report has been endorsed by both the NASA Administrator and the Space Force Chief of Space Operations

The greatest danger facing America’s democracy today is the 2024 election campaign of the man whose hard work and persistence have earned him the right to five titles: Con Man Don, Criminal Don, Coup-Master Don, Lying Don, and Moscow Don.

Why sex? Let’s do a quick review. Sex is not about reproduction. It’s not about creating identical copies of yourself. It’s about mixing and matching. It’s about playing the odds. It’s about innovation. It’s about creating utterly unique individuals. Individuals of a kind that have never been seen before. It’s about creating individuals of a kind who will never be seen again once they die. It’s about generating utterly unique antennae with which a cosmos in search of her potential can feel out her next possibilities. It’s about adding new lenses to nature’s compound eye. It’s about putting together the utterly unique combinations with which a cosmos can lay the base for her next invention, her next supersized surprise.

We are all a little weird and
life’s a little weird,

Why did nature allow you, the gaudiest and most wasteful plants in history, you flowering plants, you angiosperms, to thrive? Why did she favor you despite your sins, your sins of materialism, consumerism, waste, and vain display? Because your sins were blessings in disguise.

WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
In a hearing in September, a British court ruled against extraditing famed leaker Julian Assange to the US after a psychiatrist told the judge that if Assange were deported, he would commit suicide. On October 27th, lawyers representing the United States said that the claim that Assange would kill himself is false.

Over 100 million years ago, you flowering plants went through wild gyrations to reshape yourselves as insect attractors, insect manipulators, and insect payday providers. But you did more. You also reshaped the genes, bodies, and behaviors of insects.

In our last exciting episodes, trees had defied gravity, scraped the skies, and with 200,000 leaves per tree had hogged up all the sunlight. You a land plant only a few feet high, were frantically trying to work around the edges of that light monopoly. To do it, you were attempting to invent new niches in which to survive. And to pull that off, you’d conjured up a miracle drink with which to lure another great gravity defier, arthropods who flew. Insects. Which is odd. Because those insects were thieves. They plundered your precious chips in the sexual game, your grains of pollen.

Three weeks ago, Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, blasted billionaires for joyriding “to space while millions go hungry on Earth.”

Evolutionary breakthroughs do not just fashion new kinds of legs, wings, and brains. They do not just generate new forms of individuals. They often create something we overlook when we obsess on the origin of new species. They create new networks of interaction, new teams.

A few days after America’s controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan, the commander of the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, made a video and a series of Facebook postings in which he accused the top military brass of the crime of dereliction of duty for bungling the withdrawal from Afghanistan and causing the deaths of 13 marines.

YouTube has decided to take down video channels associated with some of the key anti-vaccine activists on the Internet, people like Joseph Mercola, Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Erin Elizabeth Finn.

It’s 100 million years ago. You, a pioneering land plant that invented leaves, have a problem. Insects have been plundering your precious sexual seed, your pollen. So you’ve done a judo switcheroo and have convinced these insects to be your sexual carriers, air-lifting your male pollen to other plants’ female parts. You’ve invented inter-species commerce. And you’ve done it for one single reason and one reason only: sex.

Who invented showing off? Who invented flashing your bling, spending vast sums to flaunt, dazzle, and to grab attention? And hopefully to get sex? Was it greedy capitalists? Was it the rich trying to suck blood and money from the masses? Was it the advertising industry trying to shove consumerism down the throats of the proletariat? No, it was plants.

America is in trouble. We are at war with covid, and the delta variant of covid is beating us.

Two months ago, on July 17th we had only 83 deaths in a single day. Now our daily death toll is topping 2,000. On September 9th, it shot above 3,200.

Some experts are terrified by Artificial Intelligence, the new form of intelligence that may make cars, smart phones, drones, and weapons systems smarter than you and me. Why? They are afraid that as artificial intelligence powers autonomous machines and wanders in cyberspace looking for things to do, it will deem us unnecessary and purge the earth of our species.

The new book Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reveals that when the election of November 2020 was driving president Donald Trump into highly erratic behavior, Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, called his Chinese counterpart and assured the Chinese general that if America were going to mount a surprise nuclear attack, Milley would call the Chinese general in advance and warn him.

The biggest covid news of this moment is that there are two anti-covid pills in development, one from Pfizer and one from Merck.

Pfizer’s pill is in what is called phase 2/3 trials, trials that compare the new drug with a standard treatment. Merck’s is in phase 3, being tried on up to 3,000 patients. The Pfizer treatment works by slowing the virus down so that your immune system can beat it and eject it from your body.

More than almost anything else in the universe, sex calls on us to radically reexamine our scientific assumptions. And to toss some of them away. Why? Remember, you, a mere land plant 500,000 years ago, used an industrial process so intricate and multi-stepped that even a hedge fund accountant would have had trouble keeping track of it. And the process that you employed does more than merely slap nature in the face. It violates two of the most basic principles of science. Two of the most basic principles that scientists since 1865 have sworn rule the universe.

So sex has three big payoffs.

Payoff number one. The male-female combo is a way of tapping into the power of what game theorists call “mixed strategies.” Males are gambles on wild exploration. Exploration so dangerous that less than one in a million sperm strike home. Females are bets on the safe, the tried and true. Sex uses male and female to harness opposites—to use both risk and caution simultaneously.

Why are thousands of Afghans trying to flee Taliban rule? Because of the Taliban’s track record. One of the most chilling track records on the planet.