The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Rise of the New Normal Reich CJ Hopkins I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. I didn’t think it would get to the point where the  Wall Street Journal  would go full Buck Turgidson and call on the United States to  “show it can win a nuclear war,”  but I wasn’t entirely off the mark either. Back in January (i.e., a million years ago), in  The Last Days of the Covidian Cult , I wrote: ” … we are getting dangerously close to the point where GloboCap will need to go full-blown fascist if they want to finish what they started. If that happens, things are going to get very ugly. I know, things are already ugly, but I’m talking a whole different kind of ugly. Think Jonestown, or Hitler’s final days in the bunker, or the last few months of the Manson Family.” I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel like the threat of global thermonuclear war qualifies as a “different kind of ugly.” And, OK, before you accuse me of exaggerating the danger of the ungodly ...

The nudge matrix How they're playing you like an accordion laughlyn (johan eddebo) Imagine that it’s 1947, and you’re an operative of a newly formed US intelligence agency superseding the OSS. Your current assignment is to subvert the government of a small yet regionally powerful nation state to favor US business interests. Add that this state largely exists outside of the sphere of Western cultural or economic influence. To begin with, what tools do you have? In reality, they’re not that many. You don’t have a US-aligned opposition party to funnel money into, and nothing akin to an established cultural hegemony here. No strong Disney presence to utilize. And both the opposition and the nationalist elite and its political institutions are suspicious of all sorts of outside influence, jealously guarding their indepencence, so all sorts of direct institutional support and funding above the board are precarious. Neither do you own the media, which is a mix of private and public establ...