The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Politburo Tsarina Kamala's Last Task I am sure of three things: death, taxes, and the D party's subsequent choice for president being worse for America than the prior one. Now they're going for a death thrust with cackling. TRYGVE E. WIGHDAL Even Batman Would Drink Here In 1994, I was invited to give a small talk at the University of Texas, Austin, titled “How I Became the Enemy of the State #1.” It was nice, intimate, which is to say neither I nor my small country were interesting enough to attract any significant crowd, but, as Orson Welles once said, “You only need one,” so you have to give full attention and respect to anyone willing to listen to you, no matter how small the gathering. It also has its advantages. After the talk and discussion, we went to the Dean’s home for a party. At one moment, a friend, a professor at UT at the time, said we had to leave if we wanted to drink; the esteemed guests should not see us wasted. So we went. In a bar near that famous ...

  China Has Achieved Escape Velocity: It Is Now Unstoppable PEPE ESCOBAR The 21 st  century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century. The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing,  designing an economic road map all the way to 2029,  was a stunning affair in more ways than one. Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive. And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations. Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric,  multi-nodal  world (italics mine). The pro...

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  Petrified Hollywood The ossification of empires RADIO FAR SIDE Hollywood began as a battle to the death between Thomas Edison and Georges Méliès, with Edison pirating Méliès’ work, particularly  Le Voyage dans la Lune   (1902), leaving the pioneering French director bankrupt and destitute. Edison is analogous to George Lucas, while Georges Méliès would be Steven Spielberg — the former is a consummate technician whose greatest film was  directed by someone else , and the latter a consummate storyteller and illusionist. Thus, Hollywood was born as a swindle and not much has changed. For folks who follow the laments of  Doomcock ,  Nerdrotic  and  Critical Drinker , much has been made of the decline and fall of Hollywood. The consensus is that Hollywood has Gone Woak and is in the process of Going Broke, and to a greater or lesser extent this is true. Certainly, the giants like Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. have nose-dived i...