“When someone takes a beating or gets killed by police, city bureaucracies go into siege mode, reflexively stalling and delaying at every turn. The patience of complainants and their families is stretched to the limit. Embarrassing information, if it ever comes out, comes out years later, long after the streets have calmed down.” Continue reading I Can’t Breathe-the killing that started a movement (Matt Taibbi):
Jonathan Miller brings us the first biography on homicidal mayor turned mass murdering populist dictator Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte. Martial law, extra judicial killings (EJK’s), murky & nondescript rampaging death-squads & excessively-crass n’ crude expletive-lumbered vocal attacks on anything deemed challenging, annoying, non-compliant et-al. A leader in egregious authoritarian bollocks basically. As funny as this foul-tongued psycho is, the body count makes it less amusing – “On day one, he launched a Latin America-styled ‘Dirty War’, and with it introduced the darkest of Latino shadows: the death squad. By the end of year one, he was presiding over the largest loss of life in Southeast Asia since Pol Pot took Cambodia back to Year Zero”. Continue reading Duterte Harry-fire and fury in the Philippines (Jonathan Miller):
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):
“No other culture sends its young boys and girls away to school to prepare them for a role in the ruling class. – beating, bullying, fagging, cold baths, vile food and paedophile teachers are just some of the features of this elite education, and, while some children loved boarding school, others now admit to suffering life-altering psychological damage. – stiff upper lip exposes the hypocrisy, cronyism and conspiracy that are key to understanding the scandals over abuse and neglect in institutions all over the world.“ Continue reading Stiff Upper Lip-secrets, crimes and the schooling of a ruling class (Alex Renton):
“Show the people that our Nobility is not noble, that its lands are stolen lands – stolen either by force or fraud: show people that the title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating, or court harlotry; dissolve the halo of divinity that surrounds the hereditary title; let the people clearly understand that our present House of Lords is composed largely of descendants of successful pirates and rougues; do these things and you successfully shatter the Romance that keeps the nation numb and spellbound while privilege picks its pocket.” – Tom Johnston, Our Scots Noble Families, 1909 Continue reading Entitled-a critical history of the British aristocracy (Chris Byrant):
‘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’). Continue reading Narco & Gangster States, Capitalism, and London & New York money laundering of criminal currency through the commercial banking sector (Cartel Land, Roadmap To Hell, Amexica, Gangster Warlords, More Terrible Than Death, HSBC: Les Gangsters de la Finance)
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):