The tide of illegal immigration from or through Mexico slowed down just once in recent years, and that was during the 2009 economic collapse, which was caused entirely by selfish billionaires trying to trick their investors. The Big Short, we could call it, as in the movie. This suggests that if immigrants see that they won’t find work in America, they will stop coming.

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the p...

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart,...