The Post-Partisan Emporium

  EVERYBODY KNOWS THE CAPTAIN LIED Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows Having heard this Leonard Cohen classic on the radio a few days ago, the lyrics have been rattling around in my head as a perfect description of the dystopian horror show we are experiencing in the world today. The song has a dark, foreboding, cynical tone, capturing the sense of a coming catastrophe which everybody can see coming, but we are helpless to stop. Cohen wrote the song in 1987 and it perfectly captures the mood of a Third Turning Unraveling, where greed; narcissism; the breakdown of societal trust; confidence in governmental and financial institutions; and the deterioration of society into the “haves” and “have nots”; sets the stage for the  Fourth Turning Crisis  of financial collapse, war, and a violent bloody resolution by 2032. Third Turnings are periods o

  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?

  The Laughter of Wolves John Michael Greer As I write these words, lean gray wolves are pacing through a rain-soaked landscape in eastern Europe.  Dim rumbling sounds in the far distance, like summer thunder that’s strayed into the wrong season, don’t bother them. Nor does it trouble them that the forest around them is dotted with the decaying ruins of buildings abandoned half a century ago. Something else doesn’t disturb them, either, but we’ll get to that. Keep the wolves in mind as we proceed. Keep them in mind. It may seem like an improbable leap from wolves running through the forest to a flustered speech by one of the pampered darlings of the Western world’s corporate aristocracy, but there’s a connection. The pampered darling is Yuval Noah Harari, the chief intellectual of  the Davos set these days. I hope I won’t be accused of setting up a straw man if I mention that he’s a gay vegan atheist who practices mindfulness meditation and writes the kind of big-picture history books