The Post-Partisan Emporium

  America 2.0: Taxation Without Representation Elected or selected, and set for life DONALD JEFFRIES Our Founders never envisioned that those selected to represent the interests of the people would be career politicians. They pictured statesmen, who were interested in public service, not lining their pockets. They never thought of writing term limits into the Constitution. Those enjoying the free ride surely aren’t going to implement them. In 1944, John T. Flynn, best remembered as the “cancelled” head of the New York chapter of the America First Committee trying to prevent our entrance into World War II, wrote the book  Meet Your Congress.  It was not just an expose on how bad Congress already was, but a plea for the legislative branch to flex their muscles, and check the unbridled power of the judicial branch and the imperial presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Constitution established three separate but equal branches of government, which was supposed to prevent t...

  Deindustrial Warfare: A First Reconaissance January 31, 2024 John Michael Greer Leave a comment This January has five Wednesdays, and in the usual way of this blog, the fifth Wednesday gets an essay on whatever topic the readers select by vote. As usual, it was a lively contest, but this time one of the perennial underdogs—warfare in the deindustrial age—came out on top. That didn’t surprise me greatly.  The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been on many minds recently, not least because neither of them has been working out the way that our politicians and pundits insisted they would. A genuine revolution in military affairs is taking place right now, and no, it’s not the one that was so loudly ballyhooed in intellectual circles a couple of decades back. The claim in the 1990s was that computer technology had opened the way to a new kind of war, in which information would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercom...