The Post-Partisan Emporium

Part 1 can be found here ... How BlackRock Conquered the World — Part 2 Going Direct The Corbett Report by James Corbett If you read  Part 1  of the  How BlackRock Conquered the World  series, you will know how BlackRock went from an obscure investment firm in the 1980s to one of the most powerful asset managers in the world after the Global Financial Crisis of 2007—2008. You will also know how BlackRock's CEO, Larry Fink, wasted no time in using the company's immense riches—with over  $10 trillion under management  and a position as one of the  top three institutional investors  in seemingly every Fortune 500 company—to gain political power. But Fink and his lackeys were not interested in accruing power merely for its own sake. No, the point of getting power is to  use  it. So the question is: how  did  they use this newly acquired political power? Well, did you hear about a little thing called the COVID-19 pandemic? If you're...

The source for that precious USofT reality! And a little info about interesting stuff...

The amorality of tech and the illusion of superiority Carlos Ramalhete Photo by  Specna Arms  on  Unsplash There is a nice book by Michael Crichton,  Timeline , in which some historians find themselves in the Middle Ages. (yes, I do love escapist fiction; I even  write some .) The best thing in the book is that the author managed to avoid the ugliest and most absurd cliché of time-travel fiction, and his characters are not somehow superior to people from that other moment in time. In fact, they find again and again that some black legends about that time were wrong. Of course, the  awful movie version  reverses it, to the point of having a character saying they had centuries of superiority over the guys chasing them. Ugly, indeed. But movies, like camels, are made by committees. Recently I read another time-travel book — in fact, a trilogy ( Island in the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling ) — in which a whole islandful of XXth-Century Yankees become the c...