The Post-Partisan Emporium

COVID AND THE LANDFILL DAY LABORERS You may have watched some documentary or other about people who survive by scavenging food, metals or other materials from Third World garbage dumps. It’s an easy target for filmmakers: one location and plenty of sadly compelling visuals and characters. Last week, I had an open day at my regular job. So I worked at the 300 acre Edgeboro Landfill, which rises 15 stories above the rivers and flatlands at its East Brunswick, NJ base. I spent seven-plus hours picking up pieces of plastic, styrofoam, insulation and other dross that would otherwise be windblown into surrounding areas, and stuffing it into black, 30 gallon Hefty bags. Fundamentally, the work resembled one of those Earth Day volunteer walks, where suburban people go to urban neighborhoods and, along with residents, pick up litter left by other residents. Though my work took more time, and I got paid for it. A landfill smells way worse than does a city street. The odor comes from mercaptans;

Reimagining Political Economy John Michael Greer Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time.  Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human value, and is cracking apart around us as we watch, an astonishing number of people have lost the ability to imagine any alternative to it that doesn’t duplicate all its worst features. Now of course there are reasons for this. I’m thinking here, to begin with, of  a thoughtful recent essay  by Eve Ettinger challenging the current popular notion of “burnout.” Ettinger spent twenty years in an abusive religious environment and, like many survivors of experiences of that kind, came out of it with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Her essay notes that many of the people she knows who complain of

Send In The Clown Making his entrance again with his usual flare. Good Citizen The clown of Ukrainian Oligarchs and American politicians’ sons is wrapping up his transatlantic tour of victimhood and grievance through the sacred halls of empire corruption. The western empire loves a victim with an evil oppressor to paint their animosities upon, especially if he’s a white male from Russia. The clown used all the usual American buzzwords to stroke the neoconservative and neoliberal war mongers of the blood thirsty western hyena war den known as District of Counterglobalwarfareintoperpituity. He gave them the full reach around experience complete with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 references and even threw in a Martin Luther King Dream reference just before they climaxed. War and death and suffering really gets them off when they’re not transferring the next ten generations’ of American taxpayer money to the corporate assholes who pay them back millions to get them elected. The poor janitors of th

War, smoke and mirrors On the war propaganda and the digital unreality laughlyn (johan eddebo) There's something wrong. I mean, of course there’s something wrong. That’s why you and I are sitting behind screens on opposite ends of a global tangle of copper, poison and plastic, trying to make sense of this increasingly disturbing and manipulative horrorshow (Хорошо), rather than lazing around in the afternoon sun, eating mongongo nuts and watching our kids play. But there seem to be things more sinister simmering here. Things more ominous than the old rut of the spectacle and its frivolous lies that everyone always knew were half-truths at best. You remember that old trope  about how everyone in the USSR paid lip service to what was reported in Правда (the official newspaper of the CPSU) but nobody really believed a word? Now it’s rather like people in general, innocently and fervently, takes the official media narratives at full face value. The situation is reminiscent of some sort