The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Hamas In The Driver's Seat; US Considering Withdrawal From Syria MARK WAUCK Over the weekend Israel offered Hamas a two month ceasefire. This came basically out of the blue. What was driving this unexpected offer that seemed to fly in the face of all of Netanyahu’s public statements of intent? Maybe this—h/t Megatron. The Israeli general was speaking after the heavy casualties just the other day in an explosion in a storage facility: Israeli Chief of Staff: "We are still fighting, the battle will be long, and we will need reserve forces again. We will continue to fight Hamas with great determination for our right to live in safety. Our soldiers fell in battle during a defensive operation in the area separating Israeli towns and Gaza. The operation was aimed at creating security conditions for the residents of the Gaza envelope area to return to their homes safely. We will conduct an in-depth investigation and draw lessons so that such an incident will not be repeated." ...

  Invasion of the Mechanical Turks How a notorious automaton foreshadowed the collapse of empirical science CHRIS BATEMAN “You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.” - Michael Crichton In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his wonderous automaton, later dubbed ‘the Mechanical Turk’. A wooden man stood behind a cabinet upon which sat a chessboard. Kempelen showed the audience the elaborate mechanical gears controlling the movements of the mannikin, styled after an Ottoman magician. To the delight of the Hungarian monarch, Empress Maria Theresa, the device mechanically moved the chess pieces in response to a human player taking their turn at the board - and frequently defeated them! In 1783 at an exhibition in Paris, it beat Benjamin Franklin much to his astonishment, and although a Parisian grandmaster was able ...

  Naming Names: Professor Exposes the Banking Cartel that Has Hijacked U.S. Democracy By  Pam Martens and  Russ Martens Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A book he has spent the past decade researching and writing comes out today from the University of California Press:  Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us . Anticipation of this book’s release has caused some sweaty brows in the halls of Congress, on Wall Street, at Big Law, and in the economics community. That’s because Epstein is naming names – the names of the people who have sold out American democracy and the public interest by becoming sycophants for, or actual members of, the Bankers’ Club. The Chairman of the Bankers’ Club is the Federal Reserve, writes Epstein. That’s because the Fed has strongarmed its way to becoming both the supervisor of the Wall Street mega ...