The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Chinafication of the Western World Are you willing to sell yourself and your children to the State in order to keep everyone "safe?" Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek I will never forget my 50th birthday, bathed as it was in blood. Blood on the floor, blood on the walls. Blood in the bathroom sink. The day started fine. I attended a wedding at the Self-Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades and a reception afterwards at the couples’ Calabasas home. At the ceremony, each guest received a little box and when you opened it, out came a live butterfly, so hundreds of these butterflies flew out of the boxes all at once, into the air. A beautiful and somehow poignant sight. How long does a butterfly live? One month? At least they were free for that short time. Hopefully. A butterfly is a delicate creature and the outside world fraught with danger. After the wedding, a reception was held in the couples’ home in Calabasas. I drove over Topanga Canyon, through Old Calabasas Town and dow...

An Empire of Dreams John Michael Greer There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people.  Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools.  It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought they could make the world do as they pleased. Not something Rome’s bureaucrats anticipated. Consider the Roman Empire in the days of its power.  While its politicians and bureaucrats laid their plans and built their careers on the presupposition that their empire would endure for all imaginable time, a prisoner on a Mediterranean island—exiled for his membership in a despised religious cult—saw the empire racked with wars, famines, and plagues...

The Three Types of Expert The Ethical Skeptic A patent’s viability can be assessed by four objective criteria: its novelty, non-obviousness to a practitioner in the art, ability to be taught from prior art, and finally its isolate case of use. By these same four factors a purported expert may also be evaluated for their genuineness in delivering their craft. In specific roles during my career I have had the good fortune to both conduct patent strategies and manage successful patenting processes on behalf of my smaller clients. In one instance my team’s patent strategy successfully defended a small company’s novel technology from both politically powerful investors, as well as a very familiar and notoriously predatory intellectual property tech-development company. If you have ever filed an electronic or mechanical device/apparatus patent, you probably already bear a suspicion as to what company this might be. You would probably also be correct. Moreover, I have a handful of patents in ...