The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Remembering Wayne Shorter (1933-2023) I pay tribute to a great artist and share the inspiring open letter he wrote with Herbie Hancock in 2016. Ted Gioia Wayne Shorter (Photo by National Jazz Archive/Heritage Images via Getty Images) We’ve lost one of the great masters of American music. Wayne Shorter leaves us at age 89 . He had a transformative impact on jazz, and in the most challenging circumstances. Shorter came of age at a time when jazz saxophone had seemingly been pushed to an endpoint. After the innovations of John Coltrane—as well as Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Stan Getz, Warne Marsh, and others—who could envision any further stage in its development? Yet Shorter somehow escaped this endgame. Despite the constraints surrounding him—both aesthetic and economic—he invented a fresh new conception of improvisation and composition. While so many others imitated or stagnated, Shorter found new paths of exploration and new forms of expression. I will talk mor...

So sorry, but the lifestyle of low-cost credit and all the goodies it could buy is permanently out of stock. In focusing on geopolitics, we lose sight of the dependence of every economy on a functioning global economy  of low-cost goods, services, materials, shipping, transport, capital, labor and financial instruments, all flowing freely across borders and around the world. Russia, China, the U.S., and indeed every economy are equally dependent on access to a functioning global economy to obtain essential goods, services and capital and sell surplus production. The irony here is the "poor" subsistence villagers with very limited access to global markets will manage the breakdown of the global economy far better than the "wealthy" urban dwellers who are totally dependent on free-flowing global trade. (The villagers will be frustrated by spotty cell service; the urban dwellers will be hard-pressed to obtain enough food and fuel to survive.) What few seem to realize (...

  How Social Networks Became a ‘Subsidiary’ of the FBI and CIA The Twitter Files have lifted the lid on a secret alliance between Silicon Valley, intelligence agencies and the political establishment by  Jonathan Cook   Posted on The US Congress last tried to grapple with what the country’s ballooning security services were up to nearly half a century ago. In 1975, the Church Committee managed to take a fleeting, if far from complete,  snapshot  of the netherworld in which agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and National Security Agency (NSA) operate. In the aftermath of the  Watergate  scandal, the congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had sweeping surveillance powers and were involved in a raft of illegal or unconstitutional acts. They were covertly subverting and assassinating foreign leaders. They had co-opted hundreds of jou...