Been waiting for this one. An absolutely splendorous debut from Patrick Winn, bloviating (almost four hundred pages!), without any monotony, on the intricate, seldom-covered anthro-cosm of modern South Asia & the litany of difficulties, crisis & threats facing this extraordinary region. This is an expanse of stupendous versatility & complexity, much of which gets almost no attention in the international press save the odd incident, – “On the mainland, militaristic Buddhist kingdoms abut a pseudo-communist regime that is, in fact, ravenously capitalistic. All this is half-encircled by a largely Islamic archipelago – one that terminates in islands beholden to the Vatican.” Continue reading Hello, Shadowlands: inside the meth fiefdoms, rebel hideouts and bomb-scarred party towns of southeast asia (Patrick Winn):
‘Rogue’, ‘Failed’, ‘Gangster’ & of course ‘Narco’. As so much of modern politics increasingly defines organized crime (arguably in it’s ultimate form), it’s perhaps best to donate some attention to regions that are afflicted by the ‘classic’ model, or at least the model with the most recognized distinction of this growing phenomenon. Filthy as fuck money, drenched in blood, massive narcotic dividends, major state thievery, larceny & kleptocratic hoardings, are washed through the City of London, New York or Switzerland & stashed off-shore beyond tax authorities & public knowledge (or hygienically converted by ‘investments’ or ‘assets’). 
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. 
