I was reluctant to read this book. Slogging through an 801-page tome on a Victorian serial killer is really something I could do without. The first thing that snagged my attention among impressively adulatory reviews was descriptions of “the greatest cover-up in British history” along with all manner of institutional & establishment corruption & crime concealment. Continue reading They All Love Jack-busting the ripper (Bruce Robinson):
Well worth remembering. Hiroshima. August 6th, 1945. The USA becomes the first (& still only) country to use a nuclear weapon against a civilian populace (it’s not like you can choose who you vaporize with these things). This very important short book (98 pages) was penned by John Hersey (appearing at first in the New Yorker in 1946), following six victims accounts of the bombing & the immediate aftermath that ensued. It’s a particularly poignant read now, considering the perilous idiocy, doom baying & extinctionocidal misrule being raced forward from the Chump administration & the Blight House. Continue reading Hiroshima-John Hersey:
“I wound up briefing the Twenty-fifth by the way of coincidence. No concerted effort was being made to educate the army about the radically new duties that had been thrust upon it. with $178 billion in defense authorizations in 2004, almost nothing was earmarked for the acquisition of knowledge about the place where the troops where the troops would be investing the next year of their lives—about its languages, its history or culture, about what was currently at stake there. None of the GIs I talked to out at the base in Kandahar had received such training.” Continue reading The Punishment Of Virtue-inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (Sarah Chayes):
“More than any other previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. they believe that they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine – to redirect the trajectory of human evolution.” Continue reading World Without Mind-the existential threat of big tech (Franklin Foer):
“WE’RE ALL SCREWED AND HERE’S WHO TO BLAME” –
So states the cover of this palatable little (relatively speaking) new book from Sam Jordison, before hobbling through forty or so fuckers that the world could absolutely do without (or of done without in some cases here as they have thankfully perished). The culprits arrange include Henry Kissenger, Simon Cowell, Tony Blair & George Bush, Piers Morgan, Paul Dacre, Jeff Bezos, Ibn Abd al Wahhab, the Koch Brothers, Pepe the Frog, Ayn Rand, Richard Nixon, Chairman Mao, Mark Zuckerberg, Theresa May & David Cameron, Lynton Crosby, L. Ron Hubbard, Nigel Farrage, Aaron Banks & obviously Donald Chump (his accomplices Bannon & Tillerson are also each given an entry) to mention a good few. Continue reading Enemies Of The People (Sam Jordison):
A staggering debut from the ferociously formidable investigative journalist & renegade economist Jacques Peretti. Peretti levels a kind of scatter-gun, all encompassing, encyclopedic approach to the current tech-corporate-surveillance dystopia/extinction-ear-mark by delving with utmost diligence into the center of these unfolding horrors (most of which will have probably escaped the publics recognition entirely or but with the faintest adumbration). Continue reading Done-the secret deals that our changing our world (Jacques Peretti):
An excellent, expansive & very well researched forewarning & investigation into an area that promises to develop into yet another mega crisis, source of survival contestation & immense peril (as if we didn’t already have enough severe threats to be consternated by) – automation, robots & specifically artificial intelligence. Whilst the First World populace is atrophying into an alternative sub-species bereft of Homo sapiens core-qualities & capabilities & also struggling to uphold the remnants of their deteriorating humanness & advanced sentience, the “market” thinks it an appropriate occasion to introduce robots to further isolate, impair & discombobulate the ailing species engineered decline & dysfunction. Continue reading The Rise of the Robots-technology and the threat of mass unemployment (Martin Ford)
“For the last six months I have been investigating MP’s private finances. During this time, I have seen just how corrupt Parliament has become. Greed is endemic. If you want to understand why British politics isn’t working, it seems the first place to look is in the bank accounts of our politicians. Yet this is an issue that the authorities have turned their backs on. Rules and regulations are lax and transparency is laughable. The whole thing is shrouded in secrecy. Because of this, it is easy for politicians to milk the system and get away with it.” Continue reading Parliament Ltd-a journey into the dark heart of British politics:
“This is the story of the actual redrawing of the American political map and our democracy itself. It’s the story of how the republicans turned a looming demographic into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census. It is the story of new mapping technologies so exact that they’ve resorted and resegregated Americans, while creating congressional districts where the only competition comes from someone more extreme. It’s legal, it’s breathtaking, and much of it happened in plain sight. The Democratic majority was ratfucked.” Continue reading Rat F**ked-the true story behind the secret plan to steal America’s democracy:
“The development potential of prime sites, aided by the expedient push for “civilised” urban environments, has put city governments across the country on a collision course with rural China. Nowhere is the face-off more evident than in the conflicts over urban village land, which rankle at the core of all the stories in this book. But these conflicts are ultimately about far more central issues nagging at China’s urban future: corrupt institutions and weak civil society. These may sound like separate concerns, but the following stories show how inseparable they are” Continue reading Dragons In Diamond Village-Tales of resistance from urbanizing China (David Bandurski)