The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Weakening and Corruption of an Entire Generation of Rebels BY  MARK OSHINSKIE     Many 2020-22 Americans, who consider themselves more sophisticated than their 1950s counterpart, nonetheless embraced Coronamania’s nonsensical lockdowns, school closures, masks, testing, and vaxxes. What cultural changes caused people to go from the radical, “anti-Establishment” 1960s and cynical Watergate/post-Vietnam/“Do your own thing” 1970s to the gullible, government-believing/medical expert-worshiping 2020s?  As usual, I’ll begin with a contextualizing, slice-of-life story; two prosaic stories this time, which occurred fifty years apart. In 1972, my father was an electrician in an auto assembly plant. His employer provided hospitalization coverage for our family. My parents paid any other medical or dental bills out-of-pocket. That winter, I broke my leg doing sports. After an exam, X-rays and the application of a full-leg plaster cast, my mother wrote the Friday night...

  The American Republic Enters Roman-Style Foreign Corruption Phase Will Caesar come next? CHRIS WALDBURGER By the end of the Roman Republic, its democracy had become entirely decadent. Foreign powers were bribing the Senate. Effeminacy and depravity ruled the upper classes. Elections were entirely rigged. The old Roman religion was usurped by bizarre mystery cults from the east. Does this sound familiar? In short, the time was ripe for Julius Caesar to wipe away the rot, and then for his heir, Augustus, to become Princeps and Imperator. (Christians once saw this as provident. The great Roman peace, with its common language of Greek, its system of roads, and its law and order, allowed for the great announcement of an  evangelion  of a different kind of imperator, one who fulfilled the promise of the Old Testament, the best of Greek thought, and the grandeur of ancient heroism.) Oswald Spengler in his theory of cyclical history posited that a Caesar will always arise to cu...

  Pepe Escobar: Neocons Want War With China It was a photo op for the ages: a visibly well-disposed President Xi Jinping receiving centenarian "old friend of China" Henry Kissinger in Beijing. Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger  first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971 , preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an "unofficial", individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration. There’s the rub. Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US's enemy is dangerous, to be the US's friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine. As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom ...