"Whoever doesn't miss the Soviet Union doesn't have a heart. Whoever wants it back doesn't have a brain." — VV Putin
Have you checked if your hair is on fire today? Here comes an eclipse of the sun. Our moon will cast a totality of its shadow in a path about 100 miles wide arcing from Del Rio Texas to Bangor Maine, with lesser effects outward on each side of the path so that night will seem to fall at mid-day over most of America east of the Big Muddy. This event typically freaks out primitive peoples, and brings out the latent archaic terror even in supposedly civilized minds, reminding us in a powerfully spooky way that the cosmos runs things, not us puny humans.
You might ask: Are we hostages to cycles, Astronomical, Kondratieff, the Maunder Minimum, Fourth Turning, the Great Wave. . .? Considering the feckless doings of our own society, we seem to be yielding to some final act of cosmic punishment. What is not falling apart? Our livelihoods? Our politics? Our money system? Our morals? Our common sense, our families, our relations with other societies, our infrastructure, our culture, our business models, our education, our medicine? Alas, our government still lurches along, gone mad-dog on its citizens as it desperately sucks all power and resources unto its inner engine like a red giant star preparing for death.
Comment: While the focus here is on NPR, a similar story could be told about a number of center-left news organizations, as mainstream journalism slowly circles the drain of irrelevancy. When the mandate switches from production of thought-provoking to thought-dictating, the audience simply won't stick around.
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