The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Invasion Of The Water Snatchers Texas ranchers are fighting “green” hydrogen projects. “It’s a ridiculous amount of water.” Sister Mary Grace and Sister Mary Michael, outside the  Carmelite Monastery of Our Lady of Grace , on August 15, 2024. Photo by author. Drought has hit Schleicher County hard. Lots of the stock tanks are dry. The only plants that appear to be thriving on this part of the Edwards Plateau are scrawny mesquite trees and the ever-present prickly pear cactus. As we turned onto County Road 339, the clouds of dust from the unpaved road were so thick that I slowed down to assure there was at least 100 yards between my vehicle and the tailgate of Ray and Sandra Pfeuffer’s pickup. It was the afternoon of August 15. The dashboard in our 4Runner showed the outside temperature was 103 F. The sun was relentless. There was almost no wind. A bare handful of clouds dotted the sky. The Pfeuffers, who raise goats and cattle on a 3,300-acre ranch about a dozen miles southe...

  On Being a "Threat to Democracy" Power to The People? Donald Jeffries Merriam-Webster defines “democracy” as: “a: Government by the people  especially   :  rule of the majority,  b:  a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” Well, that sounds good. Do we have a rule of the majority? The majority of Americans, after all, about eighty percent of them, are losing in this rigged economy, and living paycheck to paycheck at best. I don’t think they’re “ruling” anything. We all (well, some of us) know that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution clearly states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Again, sounds good. But when’s the last time you heard about one of our tyrannical judges ...

  Countless Conspiracies New World Orders are a dime a dozen Joe Allen It’s easy to imagine a One World Conspiracy to control the entire planet. This idea slides right into the “Evil” slot in the human mind. When your cognitive evil-detector goes off, an imagined human cabal—perhaps wearing black robes—is liable to appear in your mind’s eye. These shadowy Bad Guys either merge with the demons in your head, creating a satanic cabal; or else the human element shoves the supernatural entities aside, bringing the “demons” down to earth as a One World old-boys’ network. You either get a conspiracy of devil-worshipers or a conspiracy of devilish humans. As with peas and mashed potatoes, it all ends up the same place. If ye ain’t careful, thar bound to get’che. I’m as prone to imagine a unified front as any other paranoiac. But that doesn’t make it true. After careful consideration, I think it’s much worse than that. A single conspiracy is an easy problem to solve—you just neutralize the ...

  Fake Lit and the Curation of History We may need to pay closer attention to the shelves in our bookshops. The construction of the pseudo-reality is entering its secondary phase: the curation of historical amnesia and myopia. John Waters The Darker Side of Bad Books There is an aspect of propaganda to which  we may be paying insufficient attention: the curation of history. Through the work of Mattias Desmet and others, we are pretty much on top of the quotidian drip of news-management, indoctrination, misdirection, disinformation and normalisation disguised as warnings about malinformation or ‘conspiracy theory’, and other delightful skills of the contemporary nudge-monger. But we forget that what is happening is intended to be for keeps. It is not, in other words, as if, when the would-be tyrants have achieved their objectives, they will call an end to the lying and brainwashing programmes, and then revert to something resembling what we remember as the way things used to be...