Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Cully Stimson and Henry Featherston ~

Rep.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., recently offered another unusual idea on Twitter: Abolish prisons.

Seriously. The freshman congresswoman wants Congress to pass a law abolishing all prisons. Setting aside the fact that Congress has no authority to require states to abolish prisons, let’s take a look at her idea.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., should use her influence to push for sensible ideas, not extreme notions of abolishing all prisons and jails. Pictured: Ocasio-Cortez answers questions from reporters Sept. 24 while entering a House Democrat caucus meeting at the Capitol. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Based on Justice Department numbers, abolishing prisons would set free 182,000 murderers, 164,000 rapists and sex offenders, 168,000 robbers, and other violent felons in state prison.

Ocasio-Cortez might better lead her party to put more rapists in jail by providing federal funds to help states eliminate the backlog of…

(Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin speaking to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset advocating acceptance of the Camp David accords, March 20, 1979.  Future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzchak Shamir is seated to his right.)

In exploring the creation of the state of Israel over the last 67 years the dominant figure that emerges is David Ben-Gurion.  The head of the Jewish Agency before and after World War II, Ben-Gurion guided the nascent Israeli state and dominated its politics for decades.  However, another transformative figure emerged during the same time period that many outside Israel seem to avoid giving him his due, Menachem Begin.  Whether speaking about Begin’s leadership of the Irgun and the pressure he placed on the British to relinquish its Palestinian mandate; his political leadership that brought about his election to the Prime Minister’s office in 1977 which fundamentally realigned Israeli politics to this day; or his evolution as…

(David Ben-Gurion)

A STATE AT ANY COST: THE LIFE OF DAVID BEN-GURION is an apt title for Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev’s new biography of Israel’s first Prime Minister.  Segev is a prolific writer who is the author of seven books ranging from a biography of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal; THE SEVENTH MILLION; 1967: ISRAEL, THE WAR AND THE YEAR THAT TRANSFORMED THE MIDDLE EAST; and  ONE PALESTINE, COMPLETE.  Segev’s books reflect impeccable research that includes archival work, interviews, and a strong command of secondary materials in addition to examining previously unavailable materials.  This approach dominates all of his previous books as well as his newest effort.  For those familiar  with Ben-Gurion’s life  and decision making it is clear that the creation of an Israeli state was paramount, even to the point of sacrificing refugees from Europe during and after the Holocaust or turning against other leaders and…

“Whichever party gets the most votes and the most seats, if not an absolute majority, has the first right to seek to govern, either on its own or by reaching out to other parties.”

The Conversation has a “Climate explained” series with articles centered around a (climate change related) question that get answered by an “expert”. The question of the article that is the subject of this post is “Why some people still think climate change isn’t real” and the expert who answers this question is David Hall, a Senior Researcher in, ahem, Politics.

He tries to explain in the article what drives the “deniers” and how to “undo” their denial.

I cannot possibly cover the entirety of King John’s reign in this one post, therefore I will cover more personal issues along with issues regarding the succession.

John (December 24, 1166 – October 19, 1216) was King of England from 1199 until his death in 1216. He lost the Duchy of Normandy and most of his other French lands to King Philippe II of France, resulting in the collapse of the Angevin Empire and contributing to the subsequent growth in power of the French Capetian dynasty during the 13th century. The baronial revolt at the end of John’s reign led to the sealing of Magna Carta, a document sometimes considered an early step in the evolution of the constitution of the United Kingdom.

King Henry II of England and Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine had five sons: William IX, Count of Poitiers, who died before John’s birth; Henry the Young King; Richard…

We are experiencing a new age of protest, a different type of activist and an intriguing role for media. The issues are evolving and the speed of the activist outreach (via fear and outrage) is accelerating. As the game changes, what will happen to the old generation of game changers?

Greenpeace had always been the game changer but over the decades it has run its business like an empire. In the halcyon days of the 1990s and 2000s, the global NGO could afford to take on governments, buy ships and bully companies. But Greenpeace could not adapt to the shift to social media tribal communities. As the activist game changed, Greenpeace had grown too fat while much more nimble activist upstarts and social media gurus were eating their lunch. It seems now the old lady of environmental NGOs is starting to starve to death.

I looked at the last five…

The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 as a result of the 9/11 attacks. It invaded Iraq in March 2003 in response to the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

These acts prompted an unprecedented flood of articles in newspapers and magazines, TV documentaries, conferences, seminars, papers and hundreds of books speculating whether America was now, finally, at last revealed to be an ’empire’ with nakedly ‘imperial’ ambitions.

British economic historian Niall Ferguson entered the debate with a Channel 4 TV series and book on the subject – which also neatly complemented the C4 TV series and book he had published in 2003 about the British Empire.

When I bought it I thought, from its subtitle (‘The rise and fall of the American empire’), that it would be a history, maybe a chronological account of the growth of American power.

But it isn’t. Even more so than…

The problem of why civilisations fall is too important to be left to the purveyors of scissors-and-paste history. It is truly a practical problem of our time, and this book is intended to be a woodsman’s guide to it. (Preface p.xxii)

Ferguson doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, in fact he enjoys storming the big subjects – the Origins of the Great War, why the British Empire was a Good Thing, the Future of America, a Complete History of Money, a Complete History of the 20th Century. It is no coincidence that the last four of these books were written to accompany four blockbusting TV series, TV being a medium which favours striking stories and bold statements, contrarian points of view and press release-friendly controversy.

This is Ferguson’s fifth book-of-the-TV-series, created after the crash of 2008 revealed the weakness at the heart of the western financial system and events…