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03 Jun 2026 calmatters.org civic journalism nonprofit media press freedom California politics local news government accountability Democracy CalMatters

The Last Honest Room

CalMatters is a nonprofit newsroom fighting to keep California's democracy accountable as local journalism collapses nationwide. Through investigative reporting, free distribution, and AI-powered transparency tools, it turns civic information into real legislative change.

23 May 2026 The Witch Robert Eggers Calvin The Reformation Puritans horror

The Witch Within

Robert Eggers' 2015 film The Witch: A New England Folktale is one of the rare horror films that earns the right to be called theological.

21 May 2026 anarchism political philosophy Intellectual History philosophy of governance

An Historical Survey of Anarchist Thought

A survey of anarchist thought from ancient Greece and Daoist China through the radical Reformation, the 19th-century theorists who named the tradition, and the analytic philosophers and anthropologists who gave it new rigor — tracing a question that has never been adequately answered.

19 May 2026 Buddhism Satyagraha Ashoka Gandhi Nonviolent Resistance Tibet Iron Law of Oligarchy

The First Satyagrahi

Twenty-five centuries before Gandhi, the Buddha built the same machine: moral witness against a vulnerable public transcript, a portable anti-wolf-pack institution, and a political transformation without a Napoleon.

19 May 2026 political-theory elite-theory mass-psychology revolutionary-failure tragic-realism institutional-design Gandhi

Wolves, Sheep, and the Absent Shepherd

Marx got the economics mostly right and the anthropology catastrophically wrong. This paper proposes a tripartite model — wolves, sheep, and the structurally rare shepherd — to explain why revolution reliably produces the next Napoleon, and what, within genuine constraints, can actually be done.