The Post-Partisan Emporium

 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 are relatively f

Ultra-Processed People On bratwurst, baby-buying, and the lie of puberty blockers MARY HARRINGTON In news that should surprise no one, the  Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine  (SEGM)  reports  that the supposedly robust evidence base for puberty blockers is not just weak: it fails to replicate. The original Dutch studies on using off-label cancer drugs to halt puberty in gender-confused children claimed doing so afforded modest improvements in mental-wellbeing for some patients. But  a newer study , just published, re-analysed existing data to show that for the majority this drug made no improvements to mental health, and around a third actually deteriorated. This underlines what ought to be obvious. Dosing physically healthy kids with an off-label cancer drug with  side effects  that can include osteoporosis, seizures, cognitive impairment, and sterility is not, as supporters  claim , a safe and temporary intervention but a powerful iatrogenic harm. And it’s being pursued desp