“The lessons learned from unanticipated accidents at three different nuclear power plants should reassure us of what? That future unanticipated problems with other nuclear power plants won’t be serious? That engineers have acquired clearer foresight and the potentially catastrophic risks of nuclear power generation have been eliminated? That once the utility companies see that the goal of maximizing profit has led to unacceptable levels of risk they will stop maximizing profits? That complex systems that create risk can be made safe with more complexity? That there will never be another “normal accident”, the term coined for failure that can be understood in hindsight but cannot be predicted because of the complexity of the system? And don’t forget that the problem of the safety of nuclear waste storage has never been solved. We’ve made our point.”
Continue reading An Inconvenient Apocalypse – Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen):All posts by Kanju
Red Memory – Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Tania Branigan):

“At some level it seemed incomprehensible that hundreds of millions of people ignored ten years of their lives that had shaped them profoundly. Some have not been allowed to discuss it. Some fear the practical repercussions of raising it. Some simply cannot bear to address it. Others hush as if it were a curse, so powerful that its very mention darkens current peace and prosperity. It is, to them all, unspeakable. And the Party and those it rules have conspired in amnesia. A decade has disappeared.”
Continue reading Red Memory – Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Tania Branigan):Dark Money-How a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US (Jane Mayer):

“Behind the street theater was some of the countries wealthiest businessmen who had painstakingly been trying to build up the “counter-establishment” since the 1970s and now saw the publics unrest as an amazing opportunity to at long last mobilise popular support for their own agendas.”
Continue reading Dark Money-How a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US (Jane Mayer):The Bride-An illustrated history of Palestine 1850-1948 (Roger Hardy):

“In the end, the Zionists won their state not through the force of argument but through the force of arms.”
Continue reading The Bride-An illustrated history of Palestine 1850-1948 (Roger Hardy):Beef, Bible and Bullets – Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro (Richard Lapper):

“A 1983 holiday expedition with fellow officers to a garimpo (an informal gold mine) in Bahia led to criticism from his superiors, who claimed they were concerned by his “excessive economic and financial ambition”. –
“A military court judgement earned him a fourteen-day prison sentence. A year later, he found himself in even hotter water. In a piece published in October 1987, Veja named him [Bolsonaro} as one of the ringleaders in a plot to bomb military installations: armed action designed to lend force to his group’s trade-union style demands. The attack never took place and the military court found him not guilty. But in practice the affair meant his days in the army were numbered. In December 1988 Bolsonaro quietly transferred to the reserve and started a new career.”
Rupert’s Adventures in China – How Rupert Murdoch lost a fortune and found a wife (Bruce Dover):

“It’s a rare and extraordinary honour for any Western business leader to be afforded a private dinner inside the Beijing leadership compound – even more so that the Murdoch family should be present.”
Continue reading Rupert’s Adventures in China – How Rupert Murdoch lost a fortune and found a wife (Bruce Dover):Illusion Of Safety-New Rules, Same Game, Less Instruction CD:

Guess who’s back? flush with post-infectionary zest & more real-time world-turmoil than the mind can manage – it is the wonderful Illusion of Safety.
Continue reading Illusion Of Safety-New Rules, Same Game, Less Instruction CD:Green is the New Red – An insider’s account of a social movement under siege (Will Potter):

“The most disgraceful periods in history were arrived at slowly, methodically, with an infinite number of decisions being made, every day, by real people. There is no going to sleep one night in a democracy and waking up the next morning to police roundups. There is no “tipping point,” there are many points, and at each of them we have a choice – do we continue down this path, because it has not yet affected us personally, or do we intervene?” – Will Potter
Continue reading Green is the New Red – An insider’s account of a social movement under siege (Will Potter):The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens):

“Murdering priests and dumping forty-seven bodies in the street in one day could not be seen in the context of defeating the terrorists; on the contrary such acts were probably counterproductive.”
Continue reading The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Christopher Hitchens):Victor Lewis-Smith, 1957-2022, Paul Sparks, TV Offal:

Ah’ hell! So there goes Victor Lewis-Smith … after a “short illness” – a term that he may well of proffered to describe his life – in the typical fugue of overly-descriptive sardonic rampancy he was notorious for rousing.
Continue reading Victor Lewis-Smith, 1957-2022, Paul Sparks, TV Offal: