The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Beyond Lenocracy John Michael Greer I think most people have had the experience of watching a jumble of unorganized thoughts sort out all at once into a lattice of meanings, with a single word filling the role of seed crystal. It’s something that happens to me tolerably often.  Much of the direction of my life was set, for example, one day in my early twenties when the word “decline” became such a seed crystal, and helped me see that the future taking shape around me was neither progress nor collapse but the common fate of all civilizations. I’ve recently had another such verbal seed crystal drop into my mind. This one wasn’t anything like as worldshaking as the concept of decline has turned out to be, and it also had a curious feature; I grasped the concept in an instant but I had to invent a word for it. The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from  leno , the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps. Let’s unpack th

  A Bridge Too Far Infrastructure as metaphor RADIO FAR SIDE Unless you’ve been sleeping under a bridge, then you’ve heard that a container ship lost power on March 26th, and drifted into a support pylon on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbor, which set off a catastrophic collapse of the bridge, port traffic, and one of the city’s primary commuter routes. Baltimore was founded by a 1632 charter from Charles I, to Cecil Calvert, Baron Baltimore of Ireland. The name Baltimore comes from the Irish " Baile an Tí Mhóir ," meaning “city of the Big House,” and “big house” is a term used by slaves on the plantations for the main residence, or the master’s house. It is also a common slang term for a prison, or similarly to a central or primary government structure. Wait, it gets better. This event couldn’t be more packed with symbolism if David Lynch had directed the scene. A Singapore-registered container vessel named  “MV Dali”  appears to have succumbed to tainted fuel

  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