“But with neoliberal governments, an unjust distribution of wealth is becoming the norm. Even in wealthy countries, working people are earning lower salaries, fewer benefits and have less free time. Simply put, the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer; I wonder if the rest of the world isn’t coming around to Mexico City.”
“The next generation of physicists and cosmologists will have the fun and excitement of discovering the right mathematical formulation of a “multiverse.” Finding observational (astronomical?) ways to confirm that we live in such a diverse world is another challenge. Only the old fogies who thought that physics was almost finished are disappointed. The only thing that I would find discouraging would be that we run out of questions.”
“I had a rare congenital malformation in the blood vessels of my left hemisphere and at the age of 37 the malformation (AVM) blew and resulted in a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain. On the morning of the stroke, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I describe myself as an infant in a woman’s body.”
Debs was the great voice of socialism in the United States for the first two decades of the 20th century, a five-time presidential candidate for a third-party crusade against capitalism. He was a homegrown rebel, born and raised in Indiana, and a powerful speaker who knew how to translate socialism into an American idiom.
From what I witnessed, and certainly in my experience, many of the high level coaches in the 80s deployed a particularly tough approach that would be considered by outsiders to the sport, emotional abuse. As a participant, the seemingly ‘aggressive’ tactics just seemed like the norm. And I just got used to it. It didn’t seem especially awful at the time as it is what most of my friends were also going through.
“Tufts and Tenen saw themselves as guardians of the cave. They were extremely concerned that their discovery could be looted and destroyed, as had happened to other caves in southern Arizona. They were determined to preserve its pristine quality. They became obsessed with secrecy, and hired a lawyer to write out a legally binding secrecy document that they insisted that anyone whom they had any reason to tell about the cave must sign. Tenen even made his future wife sign a secrecy document on their second date!”
“At Wynn Las Vegas, for instance, there is a special and very luxurious entrance for guests who pay, or are invited to stay in the “Tower Suites”—hotel rooms that are no larger or different than the rest of the hotel other than that they have this special entrance and more intimate front desk. The swimming pool for these suites is literally above and overlooking the pool for regular folk—so Tower Suite guests can look down on the hoi polloi. In fact, the whole resort has been designed to allow these patrons to move around in their own private sphere.”
“Around the entire world what I see is Europe and China investing into and buying greater shares of foreign economies—and thus gaining significant political and even military leverage over them—at our expense. Power has to be a fair balance among a range of tools, including the military, in order to be used effectively. We’re not doing that now, and I don’t see a good strategy coming out of Washington as to how to do it better.”
“In waking we tend to think The Dream vanishes, evaporates in daylight like morning dew on grass. But it doesn’t. The unsettling Matrix-esque truth here is that we all live in world-simulations, pretty much all of the time. The brain isn’t out in the world; it’s locked in a dark box in your head. Patterns of information ting against our senses and get routed into the brain for model assembly. One of the core insights of the science of perception is our models of the world are heavily interpreted—our own expectations and cultural mores and personal history shape “The Real,” so that in some ways our personal little submarines move through an ocean of our own making.”
“If I had to pick a single overall theme in the book, I would say it’s to rectify the misunderstanding of what fascism is and to highlight the deep historical, ideological and emotional ties between progressivism (now called liberalism) and fascism.”
Sir Benjamin Thompson, a.k.a. Count Rumford, is probably most familiar to modern ears as the inventor of the Rumford Fireplace. Yet that honorarium does not begin to cover the career – tinkerer, teacher, soldier, and spy – of this poster child of the Enlightenment.
Asahara amassed hundreds of million dollars and sent agents to far-flung destinations to ferret out information and materials for use in bioweapons. In 1995, he sought to hasten the apocalypse and seize earthly power by spreading an unlikely sacrament, sarin gas, in the Tokyo subway system. This event killed twelve people outright and injured another thousand or more, many of them seriously. The group had carried out a previous gassing, a sort of practice run for the Tokyo event, in the outlying town of Matsumoto. Seven died.
Gold, jewels – that was what the new world promised and that was what the Spanish demanded. It is the same paradox that had English settlers starving on the shore while lobsters scuttled underfoot. If it wasn’t what they had imagined, it didn’t exist.
Readers of faint heart beware when embarking upon this superb work of history. So many stories of suffering are here collected, so utterly specific in their brutal details, a strong stomach will be required. Yet, it is worth the pain since one cannot emerge doubting: the epoch is surely one of history’s most vicious; and its revelation of the Twentieth Century’s brutality is dumbfounding.
An Imperialist, a warmonger, blind to what was in front of him, the critics say. A Nobelist, a wordmonger, enshrined in Western memory, answer his supporters. All of these Kipling has been, but it is as a father, first and foremost, that he appears in O Beloved Kids.
Ogres are like onions, the great philosopher Shrek once said. Onions have layers, ogres have layers. And, one might add in an irrational syllogism, ogres and onions are a lot like Odd Hours by Dean Koontz.
Over the preceding two centuries, Ellis notes, a number of English, Scottish, and French thinkers had generated a large body of political knowledge that undermined the medieval worldview about government, society, and even human nature itself. Further, that the American people were the beneficiaries of this accumulated wisdom – “it had yet to be called the Enlightenment,” Ellis reminds us – which, although it had its origins in Europe, was now destined to enjoy its fullest implementation in America…
If you’re going to mix brains with bosoms, however, you have to be very careful stylistically. Readers don’t mind sex, we’re very fond of it in some cases, but we do mind when it’s over the top. And what jars in the racier bits jars overall. Underneath the adjectives and adverbs, there’s a streamlined, engaging book in here. It just needed a firm editor on passages like these
Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, The Stone Gods, is a science-fiction novel-within-a-novel adventure and might come as a pleasant surprise to the fans who have seen her through the days of feast then famine.
More intimately, van Dantzig shows us the idiosyncratic human being that powered the death-defying leaps and diamond-cut footwork. Paranoid about the KGB and Scotland Yard, perennially late to any rehearsal or engagement, often rude to his female partners, free with his sexual life at dinner parties, Nureyev comes across as a royal pain in the ass.
Posters are visual illustrations of the slogans that surround the people of North Korea constantly. North Korean society is in a permanent mobilization. Party and government declarations are stripped down to single-line catchphrases. Through their endless repetition in banners, newspaper headlines, and media reports, these compact slogans become self-explanatory, simultaneously interpreting and constructing reality.
As the California Literary Review approaches its five year anniversary and our readership continues to grow substantially, we are proud to present our new Community Forum:
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Readers can now have their say on books, ideas, politics, art, etc. Our goal is to grow a community of diverse and respectful opinions. We welcome your participation. Simply follow the above link or click on COMMUNITY at the top of any CLR page.
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Sincerely,
Paul Comstock
The three Libby’s men were the first American businessmen to receive Allied permits to travel to the Continent. They spent most of the summer there. My father kept a journal that was full of business data but also recorded tragic scenes, including the crowds of people walking down Dutch roads, coming back from forced labor in Germany, and the almost total desolation in Hamburg, where Allied bombing raids had killed perhaps fifty thousand people and a million others fled the city.
The confrontation between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was to the Italians the “political, intellectual, and moral equivalent of the first U.S. moon landing; and as a European I am stuck down here on earth watching the Yankee space ship make its landing way up there,” Valli wrote.
But with the death of Julian we have something different. To all intents and purposes we can say that paganism died as a credible political and social force in the last days of June 363.
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