The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest among an assortment of themes. Then there was this month, where three topics broke from the pack early on, a lot of people who rarely or never vote in these contests flung themselves into the fray, and all three of the leading topics got more votes than most winning topics do. Since I have the best as well as the most eccentric commentariat on the internet, I decided promptly enough that the only sensible thing to do was to do posts on all three. This week’s post, accordingly, is on the topic that nosed ahead in the final days of the contest and won the contest. Some weeks ago, in the course of the ongoing discussion of Situationism on this blog, I noted that the...

  EU Ewwww! Talk about stepping in it Radio Far Side It’s been a week of astonishing irony. Rob Reiner, a long-time and very vocal proponent of banning guns was stabbed to death. While an interesting side show, it pales in comparison to one of the great suicides in all of human history, overshadowing even Cleopatra’s asp — and history tells us she had a fine asp at that. I’m talking, of course, of the EU’s incredibly senseless and wildly reckless flying double-gainer on its own sword. Among baffling and disastrous political blunders, this one dwarfs the competition. In fact, but for Athens launching the Sicilian Expedition in 415 BC, or the USSR invading Afghanistan in 1979, it’s difficult to come up with anything more self-destructive than the EU confiscating Russia’s money. And the reason makes it all the more unhinged. This event will go down in history as one of the most monumentally stupid things any political entity has ever done. It’s going to have profound repercussions thr...

  Jack Welch, financialization, and the true force behind US deindustrialization Watch the video clips of 3 apostles of capitalism at the end, one unfortunately was not fictional Hua Bi N When I studied business in the mid-90s, there was no company more revered than General Electric and no CEO more respected than Jack Welch. For years, GE was honored as the most admired company in the world and was the most valuable by market cap. Jack Welch was the idol corporate chieftain case-studied in every business school and emulated by aspiring “corporate leaders”. He pioneered “the GE Way”. GE had an array of world leading businesses from aircraft engines, turbines, health care, NBC, Universal Studios, to refrigerators and light bulbs. GE Finance led in aircraft leasing and financing of capital goods produced by GE’s industrial units. GE executives were widely courted as corporate superstars. When Welch retired in 2001 and Jeff Immelt took over as CEO, several frontrunners to succeed Welch...