The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Whistling Past the National Train Wreck Pointlessly rearranging the deck chairs DONALD JEFFRIES There are only so many ways one can say that America is collapsing. That the Fat Lady is nearing the end of her song. That we’re running on fumes. If Yogi Berra were around, he’d say it’s over. We had a good run, as far as civilizations go. We  were  the light of the world for a long time. Maybe even Reagan’s shining city upon a hill. Yesterday, Jason Whitlock reported on one Dexter Taylor, a software engineer who was just convicted and sentenced to  ten  years for constructing his own guns without a license. Shades of January 6. Taylor is Black, by the way, for those of you to whom that matters. I don’t expect to see former crack dealer turned FBI informant “Reverend” Al Sharpton leading a protest about  this  particular Black man being a victim of injustice. Our record-setting prisons are overflowing with people like Taylor, of all races. People who most decidedly don’t belong behind bar

  Is it legal? On laws, authorities, and superstition CARLOS RAMALHETE (What the heck is going on here?!) During the personal lockdown my poor health imposed on me, I became so depressed I could hardly read anything more complicated than a cake recipe. That’s when I found what I call “the bottom of the Internet”:  pages  whose main business is reproducing idiotic Reddit tales, interspersing them with inane text that more or less paraphrases the original story so that there is some “original” content to shield them from accusations of copyright violation. Two kinds of stories are often republished at the bottom of the internet: familial woes, and workplace problems. The kind of thing that in regular fiction or news (even if most news is fictional nowadays) would provide no more than a background. Great fodder for depressed Thomist sociologists temporarily unable to face organized studies of what, in the end, is the same subject matter. The few neurons still alive in my brain, of course,