The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Are We Hungry Yet? Karen Kwiatkowski Bulldozing hundreds of established olive trees  last week, and  thousands since 1967 , and  unleashing feral pigs  to destroy Palestinian fields and gardens are parts of Israel’s war on agriculture and the environment. These tactics are important to Israel’s national security project. A country has a right to defend itself, after all. Targeting food and the ability to grow and produce food to defeat an enemy, as well as for domestic population control, is historically typical state methodology. North American bison were all but eliminated in order to drive native Americans off their lands and hunting grounds. We watch historical dramas like Downton Abbey and marvel at how food defines and separates class, liberty and power. Americans, as tenants of empires on the cusp of collapse will do, obsess over food, and their health. Simultaneously the people who will build the new republics that will inherit this continent are study...

  The Shattered Legacy of the Founding Fathers Consent, independence, and fireworks. Donald Jeffries We’re one year away from the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It remains one of the most impactful and revolutionary documents ever written. While our horrific leaders still pay infrequent lip service to it, they obviously don’t remotely believe in the sentiments expressed by Thomas Jefferson. The delineation of God-given rights, as opposed to any granted by a government, was a literary nuclear bomb. This resonated with the American colonists, who almost all believed strongly in God. Now, of course, since probably half of present day Americans at least doubt the existence of God, it becomes a much harder proposition to sell. God-given rights mean nothing to those who don’t believe in God. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would eventually translate into the Bill of Rights, which made the Constitution palatable to anti-statists like Jeffe...