The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Petrified Hollywood The ossification of empires RADIO FAR SIDE Hollywood began as a battle to the death between Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès, with Edison pirating Méliès’ work, particularly  Le Voyage dans la Lune   (1902), leaving the pioneering French director bankrupt and destitute. Edison is analogous to George Lucas, while Georges Méliès would be Steven Spielberg — the former is a consummate technician whose greatest film was  directed by someone else , and the latter a consummate storyteller and illusionist. Thus, Hollywood was born as a swindle and not much has changed. For folks who follow the laments of  Doomcock ,  Nerdrotic  and  Critical Drinker , much has been made of the decline and fall of Hollywood. The consensus is that Hollywood has Gone Woak and is in the process of Going Broke, and to a greater or lesser extent this is true. Certainly, the giants like Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. have nose-dived in quality since their creative peak in

  Exploiting the Dead Alexei Navalny Is the New Great Hero of the West RYAN DELARME Arguably the biggest story being parroted and commodified in the corporate media these last couple weeks is the death of Russian “opposition leader” Alexei Navalny. I think it’s worth asking why, in a time where there are no shortage of domestic issues, are our media institutions dedicating so much time and energy to the death of a foreign activist? In case you somehow missed it, Alexei Navalny, who was cast as the West’s answer to Vladimir Putin, died in a Russian prison under extremely mysterious circumstances with  most fortuitous timing . A litany of establishment partisan hacks, and just about every major corporate media talking head, have extensively discussed this event with uncanny emotional intensity, unanimously agreeing that it was a historically significant occurrence of gravity. Our readers understand that there is much more to the MSM today than simply turning a profit. Rather than informi