The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Preposterous Nature of “Reality” Edward J. Curtin, Jr.     It is not uncommon to be doing something seemingly innocuous when one is flooded with wild thoughts, musings that seem randomly meaningless, leading nowhere.  Thoughts that think us.  To dismiss them, however, is a mistake.  For me, these unbidden guests usually visit me when I am out walking or lying in bed right before sleep. Recently, as I was again walking across the meandering Housatonic River through the covered wooden bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, I found myself waylaid by the thought of the word “preposterous,” which is usually understood to mean absurd, very silly, or foolish.  Being happily eccentric and language obsessed, I thought of its etymology, which from the Latin means before-behind or before-after, which makes preposterous an absurd, nonsense word itself, which seemed appropriate to thoughts that were approaching me from the other side as I walked ass-backwards (my behind behind me) toward them. 

  The Perfidious Unreality of the “New Normal” Kit Knightly So, what’s with all the fake crying? Rachel Maddow pretended to cry about  “kids in cages” . Matt Hancock pretended to cry about  Covid vaccines . Sarah Sidner pretended to cry  over covid . Anderson Cooper  pretended to cry about Israel , so did  John Kirby .  Van Jones  pretended to cry after Biden “won” the 2020 “election”.  Adam Schiff  and  Adam Kinzinger  both pretended to cry about January 6th. Don Lemon  pretends to cry  about  pretty much everything . They all do it, and they’re all so  bad  at it. And speaking of  pretending badly , remember those early photos of people in China lying in the street, straight as planks, supposedly killed by “Covid”? As if this scary new virus just snuffs you out mid-step to topple backwards flat on the ground in a perfect silent movie pratfall. And it’s not just “Covid”. During the run-up to the 2020 election “pretending badly” was happening everywhere. We were told, over and over aga

  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