Category Archives: Books

Butler to the World – How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals (Oliver Bullough):

Accomplice. Enabler. Gang member.

Stolen goods & the proceeds of crime.

Worse than the original offenders by far, are the bastards that would lend their “legitimacy” to the initial criminals & provide “safe harbour” for the thieves spoils & ill-gotten gains.

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Who Owns England? – How We Lost Our Land and How to Take it Back (Guy Shrubsole):

The Land Registry, despite being a public body funded by taxpayers’ money, continues to protect the interests of private landowners by concealing what they possess. A social taboo continues to stymie questions about land and private property ownership, and makes talk of land reform politically sensitive.

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North Korean Women in Power – Daughters of the Sun (Chun Su-jin):

A curious & compelling short book by South Korean journalist & writer Su-jin Chun. It could easily have been double-speak drivel about how North Korean women are the ultimate divas or outriders of modern feminism, but it is actually a mixed-bag on the isolated regime’s complex politics, sometimes yielding troves of esoteric details on the inner-workings & origins of Pyongyang’s ruling elite & the Kim saga.

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Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman (Paul Erasmus):

Confessions of a Stratcom Hitman (Paul Erasmus):

In 1981, the bloodthirsty madness was was an exercise costing about R1 million a day. Even ‘psych ops’ – the propaganda effort at the time – could not offset the exigencies of that. The reality is that the three decades ago, the regime spent a million bucks a day on promoting death and torture to prop up an Afrikaner elite, although at the time we didn’t see it like that at all.

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A Stranger In Your Own City-Travels in the Middle East’s Long War (Ghaith Abdul-Ahad):

And so, six years after the toppling of the dictator, a few hundred thousand Iraqis killed, a brutal insurgency, trillions of dollars wasted and five thousand dead US soldiers, the country was being rebuilt on the same model of a concentration of unaccountable power, shadowy intelligence services and corruption.

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An Inconvenient Apocalypse – Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen):

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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