The Post-Partisan Emporium

The IPCC Report & the Pivot from Covid to Climate   The New Normal brigade are prepping us for a change of direction. The latest IPCC report on climate change was released last week, and has signalled a sea-change in the ongoing “big issue”. The Pandemic was fun while it lasted, but it’s time it faded back and we got on with the next stage. That’s not just my interpretation either, they are quite literally saying it themselves. Usually, when there’s a big narrative shift looming, you can find one key article that tells you everything you need to know about the plan. For the IPCC report, it’s this iNews article by Andrew Marr. Where he literally uses the phrase “hinge to climate from Covid” several times: There is a great turn coming, a change in the terms of political debate, a period of hinge. We are swinging from the many months of coronavirus obsession into an autumn which will be dominated, rightly, by the climate emergency. But much of what we have learned

Strange Days Ahead James Howard Kunstler Left: The Fall of Kabul, 2021 — Right: The Fall of Saigon, 1975 “If American Airlines were in charge, they would’ve blamed all the cancellations on weather and then given everyone’s checked luggage to the Taliban.” – Sean Davis, Editor,  The Federalist , on the action in the Kabul airport. I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years? Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative  nomenklatura  of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as

It's a good day for Vietnam analogies Welcome to the Tet Offensive phase of The War on Covid Alex Berenson Yesterday Naftali Bennett, the prime minister of Israel, issued a stark (if unintentionally) revealing warning to his country about the failure of the mRNA vaccines. As you know if you are a regular reader, Israel is the canary in the world’s coalmine for Covid and the vaccines. It vaccinated more of its citizens with the Pfizer shot more quickly than almost anywhere else. This spring, Israel’s experience seemed to validate the success of the vaccines. Now it’s a cautionary tale, as I explained in a Substack almost two weeks ago (time flies when nations are falling). Unfortunately since then the data has gotten much worse. The number of serious cases has risen almost 30-fold since late June. Roughly 60 percent of those people are fully vaccinated. Yet the vaccine fanatics refuse to admit the depth of the Israeli crisis. Instead they continue to point out that  per-person  rate

Gell-Mann Amnesia, Dissonance, and Resolution Mathew Crawford The concept of cognitive dissonance is understood by most curious knowledge seekers. It is the state of holding conflicting beliefs---and humans are great at it. It's no wonder we invented music. We may be hypnotized by harmonious, resolved chords. But we get adventurous and let in discordance---particularly when it's well designed. Perhaps we feel it as part of the nature of our conflicts. Lacking anything close to the perfect understanding of the universe, we tend to place certain amounts of trust in principles. Perhaps all living things have their heuristics, whether or not most other species rise to the level of consciousness humans have achieved. I see it as a matter of life economics---"actions reveal preferences" as the economists say. And survivor bias really does point the way to better principles. But perhaps economics is also a reason for the holding of discordant beliefs. The work that it takes

The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan Using the same deceitful tactics they pioneered in Vietnam, U.S. political and military officials repeatedly misled the country about the prospects for success in Afghanistan. Glenn Greenwald 12 min ago 35 8 The Taliban give an exclusive interview to Al Jazeera after taking control of the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 15, 2021 (Al Jazeera/YouTube) “The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today. Five months later, Bush vowed : “In the United States of America, the terrorists have chosen a foe unlike they have faced before. . . . We will stay until the mission is done.” Four years after that, in August of 2006, Bush announced : “Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds.  . . . The days of th