The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Waving the Ukrainian Flag of Surrender Hitting another new low DONALD JEFFRIES The other day, to celebrate one more atrocious piece of legislation that slapped average Americans in their already battered faces, members of  your  Congress waved a flag in celebration. Well, that’s par for the course, you might say. After all, our “representatives” love to cloak themselves in false patriotism. But they didn’t wave the American flag. Old Glory. The Stars and Stripes. The one that once still waved over the land of the free and the home of the brave. By the way, the guy who wrote our National Anthem, Francis Scott Key, would probably have reconsidered his own patriotism if he’d lived to see his grandson imprisoned by the tyrant Abraham Lincoln. No, our “representatives” were waving the Ukrainian flag. It’s the most popular flag out there. Well, the LGBQT+ model is pretty chic as well. The last known Americans to be waving an  American  flag in the Capitol are now sitting in prison, victims

 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