Utopia, you are standing in it!

A not-too-distant dystopia

I often tell my students the worst career choice they can make is one where they are not inspired by their professional activity and unable to follow their passions. Then it becomes just a job for some extrinsic worth (eg, paying the rent). This is how European farmers must be feeling when activist fear campaigns have led to political and market pressure to produce more organic food. They don’t believe that organic is safer, they see the lower yields, increased infestations and a poverty of options. They would be forced to switch to growing organic to simply try to pay the rent. Unlike the organic activist farmers who loudly and proudly believe they are changing the world by bringing their cult beliefs into the cultivation process (with each horn they lovingly fill with dung), the conventional farmer, forced by market forces to switch to organic, is merely…

Anyone familiar with the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy is aware of the flaws in his character and life story. These elements of his biography have been fully explored in studies like David Nasaw’s THE PATRIARCH: THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TURBULENT TIMES OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, Richard J. Whalen’s THE FOUNDING FATHER: THE STORY OF JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s THE FITZGERALDS AND THE KENNEDYS: AN AMERICAN SAGA. Kennedy’s life story is punctuated with “serial philandering,” a relationship with organized crime, his years as a Wall Street operator highlighted by repeated insider trading, lobotomizing his daughter Rosemary, an appeaser’s isolationist view of the world that led to his opposition to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall plan, a cozy relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, and a world view that saw fascism as a means of overcoming a…

The ninth plague of Egypt was complete darkness that lasted for three days. But in 536 A.D., much of the world went dark for a full 18 months, as a mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The fog blocked the sun during the day, causing temperatures to drop, crops to fail and people to die. It was, you might say, the literal Dark Age.

Now, researchers have discovered one of the main sources of that fog, as Becky LIttle and Brian Fuggle report. The team reported in Antiquity that a volcanic eruption in Iceland in early 536 helped spread ash across the Northern Hemisphere, creating the fog. Like the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption—the deadliest volcanic eruption on record—this eruption was big enough to alter global climate patterns, causing years of famine.

What exactly did the first 18 months of darkness look like? The Byzantine…

Martin’s savvy, streetwise, wordplayful book is a joint biography of the two great mid-twentieth century French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

It’s told in a popular, punning, jokey style which is hip to the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll reputation of these two top thinkers and proceeds by the themes, ideas and associations of their writings more than strict chronology.

This is plain enough from the title which refers to the fact that young Sartre was a boxer at school, whereas Camus is famous – to anyone who cares about these things – for being the goalkeeper for various soccer teams in his native Algeria. The aggressive pugilist spoiling for a fight, and the cautious backstop with time to admire the view – this is just one of the many dichotomies Martin uses to build up a portrait of these two complex men.

Like the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s…

The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness. (p.248)

Camus was already one of the leading writers of his day when he published his long philosophical essay, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, in 1951. Many critics consider it his best and most important book. At 270 pages in this Penguin translation, The Rebel is well over twice the length of his previous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. It is a very long recapitulation of the history of political violence from the French Revolution to Stalin’s show trials, designed to refute arguments for revolutionary violence or state terror, and to affirm positive, humanistic values.

But because it comes out of the…

The Sierra Club reckons wind power is the future, but hundreds of industrial wind projects have been canned across the USA, and plenty more are being quietly withdrawn, thanks to growing community resentment and hostility towards industrial wind power.

The only way to prevent industrial wind power from destroying your hitherto peaceful and prosperous community is to fight, and that’s exactly what Americans are doing across its heartland.

Over the last 20 years, these things have drawn community opprobrium for generating a thumping, grinding cacophony that destroys the ability of residents to live and sleep in their homes; for wrecking property values; and creating a visual nightmare reminiscent of the War the Worlds.

So, is it any surprise that in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave people are fighting with increasing fury to preserve their communities, homes and properties?

Applying pressure to local governments and…