The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Real Holes in Neverland Edward Curtin Even though it isn’t a nut, reality is especially hard to crack these days. But if you closely observe daily life all around you, no matter how superficial it may at first seem, you will catch many glimpses of why this may be so. The signs of falsehood are everywhere here in the land of make-believe, for those willing to decipher them. The big lies and deceptions of politicians, intelligence services, and their media minions have their counterparts in trivial encounters where, as Melville said,  “A smile is the chosen vehicle for all ambiguities.”  Such smiles plaster not just human faces, but appear in the signs and symbols of the wider culture everywhere you look. They are meant to tranquilize with trivia. They are offered as bait to induce people to stop worrying and be happy as their leaders smash the world to bits. I recently chanced to look down the cereal aisle of a supermarket where my already florescent-irritated eyes were ...

  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 civ...

 The first article can be found here ... The Secret of the Sages John Michael Greer Two weeks ago we talked about the way that life throughout the modern industrial world has fallen into the grip of lenocracy—that is, a system in which pimping of one kind or another is the most common feature of economic life, or in less idiosyncratic language, a system in which every economic exchange is exploited by interests that contribute nothing to the transaction but must be paid off before the transaction can take place.  Lenocracy is a feature of all complex human societies, for much the same reason that every animal species has parasites:  whenever freeloading on someone else’s labor and resources instead of doing the work yourself is an option, someone or something will be found to fill that niche. A handful of bloodsucking leeches. I’ll let you figure out why I’ve included this picture. Yet societies vary in the amount of lenocracy they tolerate. In particular, when markets ar...

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy for bringing this essay to our attention... Cthulhu Gazes Right The Regime Dons a Skin Suit ISAAC SIMPSON “But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda….Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.” -  Edward Bernays , Propaganda (1928) — Super Bowl 58. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I put a lot of stake in the images that uncontrollably flash into my mind, and when I woke up the next morning I kept seeing the same thing: Post Malone’s bolo tie.  The Ozempicked pop star eschewed his wiggerish priors for a clean cut cowboy rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Why was I thinking about this? Where had I seen it before? At the Grammys, Beyonce had appeared in cowboy gear wearing a bolo tie with a similar turquoise clasp ...