The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Engineering Stupidity What if the nub of our calamity is that the powerful believe themselves to be divinely chosen to rule over people they have decided are weak and stupid, and so conspire to render them even more so? JOHN WATERS Between Good, Evil & Idiocy What if, in all the public crimes of the past 51 months,  we were missing the most heinous of them all? It seems implausible. What if this crime was, in a sense, the only crime among the lot that might be said to have incorporated all the others? What if it was, as the final objective of the demented orchestrators of the, yes,  conspiracy , the ultimate purpose of an operation that had been in train for many years before its machinations were observed above ground? What if this was the crime that explained everything, solved all the mysteries and, in its exposure, rendered pointless all the hours and days we had spent in seeking to explain things that seemed to have no cause or meaning other than the purest, arbitrary evil?

  Message received How cultural messaging is distorting our perception of reality PETER FROST American Airlines  advertisement (1968). In addition to selling a product or service, advertising can serve a broader purpose, such as changing our culture. Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of dark-skinned immigrants while overestimating the crime rate of light-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks, and Chinese. Our perception of crime, and reality itself, is being distorted by the messaging of modern culture. The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions ... and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal, 1944, pp. 655-656) Gunnar Myrdal wrote  An American Dilemma  at the dawn of the civil rights

  The United States of Freier-dom Sorry Americans, our "greatest ally" just isn't all that into us DANIEL D The United States of Freier-dom, where simping for Israel is a way of life … Why are we Americans such schlemiels, suckers, and simps for Israel? As the (apparently)  Mossad honeypot operation known as Jefrey Epstein  showed, our oligarchs and politicians are getting some play out of the deal, at least. But what’s in it for the rest of us? Before we consider this question further, a couple of quick caveats are in order. First, anti-Zionism does  not  equal antisemitism:  not all Jews are Zionists , and not all Zionists are Jews. In America,  MOST  Zionists are  NOT  Jews, but are instead the kind of evangelical  Christians whom Israelis like to spit on . Second, ditching Israel as a “greatest ally” doesn’t mean we have to go and immediately run into the arms of the  pro-Palestinian camp . In spite of the popular saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” if y