The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Give me Liberty or Give me America 2.0 Some truths are self-evident DONALD JEFFRIES Artwork by Heidi Wurst As I’ve noted before, I was fascinated by history as a very young boy. And no part of history caught my attention like the founding of this nation. The American Revolution, the War for Independence- call it what you will. The Boston Tea Party. The Minutemen. Paul Revere’s midnight ride. The shot heard around the world. I know that our Founders weren’t perfect. Thomas Paine, the brilliant writer who produced  Common Sense,  the pamphlet that helped ignite patriotic fervor in the colonies, wound up hating George Washington, who did indeed seem to have forgotten his invaluable contributions to the movement for independence. Shockingly and inexplicably, the location of most of Paine’s remains are unknown, as I detailed in  Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963.  Washington’s actions regarding the Whiskey Rebellion besmirch his reputation. He also was unfortunately swa

  Engineering Stupidity What if the nub of our calamity is that the powerful believe themselves to be divinely chosen to rule over people they have decided are weak and stupid, and so conspire to render them even more so? JOHN WATERS Between Good, Evil & Idiocy What if, in all the public crimes of the past 51 months,  we were missing the most heinous of them all? It seems implausible. What if this crime was, in a sense, the only crime among the lot that might be said to have incorporated all the others? What if it was, as the final objective of the demented orchestrators of the, yes,  conspiracy , the ultimate purpose of an operation that had been in train for many years before its machinations were observed above ground? What if this was the crime that explained everything, solved all the mysteries and, in its exposure, rendered pointless all the hours and days we had spent in seeking to explain things that seemed to have no cause or meaning other than the purest, arbitrary evil?

  Message received How cultural messaging is distorting our perception of reality PETER FROST American Airlines  advertisement (1968). In addition to selling a product or service, advertising can serve a broader purpose, such as changing our culture. Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of dark-skinned immigrants while overestimating the crime rate of light-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks, and Chinese. Our perception of crime, and reality itself, is being distorted by the messaging of modern culture. The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions ... and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal, 1944, pp. 655-656) Gunnar Myrdal wrote  An American Dilemma  at the dawn of the civil rights