The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations. Useful Shadows. Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea. Aurelien I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper. L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been the...

  The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End Violently Truth, consequences and pain are on their way. And to the best of what I can tell, no one is prepared psychologically. Quoth the Raven For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken . Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it . The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro ). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least. Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (...