The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Invasion of the Mechanical Turks How a notorious automaton foreshadowed the collapse of empirical science CHRIS BATEMAN “You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.” - Michael Crichton In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his wonderous automaton, later dubbed ‘the Mechanical Turk’. A wooden man stood behind a cabinet upon which sat a chessboard. Kempelen showed the audience the elaborate mechanical gears controlling the movements of the mannikin, styled after an Ottoman magician. To the delight of the Hungarian monarch, Empress Maria Theresa, the device mechanically moved the chess pieces in response to a human player taking their turn at the board - and frequently defeated them! In 1783 at an exhibition in Paris, it beat Benjamin Franklin much to his astonishment, and although a Parisian grandmaster was able to s

  Naming Names: Professor Exposes the Banking Cartel that Has Hijacked U.S. Democracy By  Pam Martens and  Russ Martens Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A book he has spent the past decade researching and writing comes out today from the University of California Press:  Busting the Bankers’ Club: Finance for the Rest of Us . Anticipation of this book’s release has caused some sweaty brows in the halls of Congress, on Wall Street, at Big Law, and in the economics community. That’s because Epstein is naming names – the names of the people who have sold out American democracy and the public interest by becoming sycophants for, or actual members of, the Bankers’ Club. The Chairman of the Bankers’ Club is the Federal Reserve, writes Epstein. That’s because the Fed has strongarmed its way to becoming both the supervisor of the Wall Street mega banks while also be

 Thanks to BrahmaFear for providing this bit of good news... C.J. Hopkins Acquitted in Berlin Court finds satirist's use of a swastika to criticise anti-pandemic measures legally justified FABIAN A. SCHERSCHEL C.J. Hopkins (second from left) with his defence team appears before the court in Berlin Tiergarten US-born playwright and political satirist  C.J. Hopkins  is of the firm opinion that countries in the West are threatened by what he calls "a new kind of totalitarianism". Living and working in Berlin, he says he saw this new form of totalitarianism manifest itself in the government's anti-pandemic measures. To protest what he saw as injustice in society, he posted two critical tweets in 2022 that equate face masks with the principal symbol of conformity of this new totalitarian state. To draw parallels between this new phenomenon and the Third Reich, as the culturally most prevalent example of totalitarianism in Germany, he included his book cover in these tweet