This week’s cover story of the world’s leading trend analysis institute: very fitting, dead on the money, as usual. As I keep saying, turn off the state and corporate “news”. It’s not news. It’s 80% propaganda, 19% filler and fluff, and 1% useful information. Turn it off. Look for better,
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Writings of J. Todd Ring: The Collapse of Modern Civilization
More than 150 years ago Thoreau commented, “Our sills are all rotten.” He was right. It is for that reason that Western, and Westernized, “modern” “civilization” is collapsing. This could be cataclysmic, of course, (as in, an ecological holocaust), or relatively peaceful, (akin to the Maya abandoning their great cities
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Fantasy and Indoctrination: Rough notes on a few fantasy novels: part two
Here are two more fantasy books that I could not get through. That makes three in a row. And to think, I had a love affair with Terry Brookes’ Shannara series! (I read something like 20 Shannara novels in a row, and loved all of them, other than the last
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Three books for Christmas #nlpoli
Top Choice Where Once They Stood is arguably the most significant work on modern Newfoundland and Labrador political history in more than 30 years. The fact that it has been largely ignored in popular conversation in this the 70th anniversary year of Confederation is an affirmation of its significance. Raymond Blake
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth
This is a quick read outlining the history of the efforts to do something to slow down fossil fuel use. Everything we know now about climate change, pretty much, we knew with great certainty forty years ago, in 1979. “The climate scientist James Hansen has called a 2-degree warming ‘a
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Plague of Climate Change
I just finished Camus’s compelling read, The Plague. It’s a parable provoked by the Nazi Occupation, but also about general occupation, oppression, and isolation. It’s about resistance to incomprehensible evil and what it looks like to be a good person. But, it’s striking how well what much of he says fits
Continue readingKersplebedeb: Selected Documents from the Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades
Last year saw the 40th anniversary of the 1978 Spring Campaign of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse, or BR), a month-long offensive against the Italian state initiated by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. May 16th, 1978, was the date on which a new cabinet, one which included for the first
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Or maybe we’d recognize Nietzsche’s last man as ourselves: “Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! .
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Life After Warming
David Wallace-Wells’s book The Uninhabitable Earth starts out with a repetition of facts that won’t be news to anyone paying attention, but he has a lovely way with words. Four of the last five extinctions were from greenhouse gases, and now we’re adding carbon to the atmosphere 100 times faster than
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Seligman’s Hope Circuit
Martin Seligman is famous for a learned helplessness study I wrote about a few years back: In a famous experiment, dogs were put in a compartment and trained to jump a barrier when given an electric shock. After one or two tries, the dogs jumped the barrier immediately after being
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Seven Days of Books in One #nlpoli
The seven books from my part of the book challenge, with each described by the respective publisher’s blurb: 1. The myth of the strong leader by Archie Brown. Archie Brown challenges the widespread belief that ‘strong leaders’, dominant individual wielders of power, are the most successful and admirable. Within authoritarian regimes,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Hari’s Lost Connections
“There’s violence to knowing the world isn’t what you thought. . . . Sometimes the world doesn’t make a lot of sense, but how we get through it is, we stick together, okay?” – Gloria Burgle, Fargo I watched Joe Rogan’s interview with (interrogation of) Johann Hari about his new
Continue readingmark a rayner: The Fatness is live!
My fourth novel is available as of today! It’s a satire about concentration camps for fat people and bureaucracy gone mad. (Don’t worry, it’s a love story.) This crazy book was 12 years in the making, so I hope you enjoy it. Here’s a quick synopsis, and more purchase links
Continue readingPostArctica: Dissolving Clouds
Came across this and began to wonder… If I could do it too… So today I dissolved some clouds using only the powers of my mind. It took longer than I thought it would.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Comparing Existentialism and Stoicism
This summer, I went on one camping trip with a book on Stoicism, then another camping trip with a book on Existentialism, and I was intrigued by the many similarities. Then I came across this video that has some overlap with what I had noticed. As they say in the video,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Wasting Time
I had a brief Facebook conversation with Massimo Pigliucci about my decision to fritter away a morning watching the rain and petting my cat. He said, “It’s up to you to determine whether your morning was wasted or not. But from a Stoic perspective the good use of time comes
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Put Muslim characters who don’t need to be ‘saved’ on school reading lists
Children’s stories either written by Muslim writers or featuring Muslim main characters are typically nonexistent or problematic in their representations of Muslim experiences, writes Heba Elsherief, a PhD Candidate, Language and Literacies Education, at the University of Toronto. The post Put Muslim characters who don’t need to be ‘saved’ on
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Heretics and Believers
Peter Marshall’s Heretics and believers: a history of the English Reformation from Yale University Press (2017) arrived as a belated birthday present on Friday past. It’s proven to be well worth the wait. As the official blurb describes it, “Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: 2016 in books #nlpoli
1. Brand Command by Alex Marland. The book that political marketing and communications academics will be quoting for a while to come. 2. Observing the outports by Jeff Webb. An accessible examination of the role the new university, its professors, and students played in the social and economic changes in
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Being Useful: a Necessary Shift in Radicalism
“Oh, what can we do in a case like that? Nothing to do but sit on your hat, or your toothbrush, or your grandmother, or anything else that’s useless.“ Those are the butchered words of a Burl Ives song I sang as a kid until my sister corrected me. The last
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