The Post-Partisan Emporium

  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,

  Life Is Going to Get Crazy Or maybe we're just realizing how crazy it always has been, meaning we'll be getting more in touch with the reality of things and, hence, more sane . . . DANIEL D As Dusk Descends upon Our Civilization, Life Is Going to Get Crazy Life is always crazy. What I mean by that is, Life necessarily entails the miraculous, given how finely tuned conditions need to be in order for it to arise in the first place. Life is always tentative and precarious, in a universe full of potentially lethal hazards. However, for the past few decades of  Pax Americana , we’ve mostly been able to get away with being blissfully ignorant of all those existential threats. We’ve come to see Life as safe and predictable and maybe even a little boring. We’ve been ensconced in a comfortable cocoon of technological marvels and  complex systems  that reliably work as expected, where infant mortality rates are so low that our ruling class promotes birth  control , and where the leadin