Also germane to think how the artwork of Emory Douglas and The Black Panther paper got the party to places where they might not otherwise have reached.
Kind: Notes
I watched The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and The Weather Underground documentaries. Almost hard to comprehend what a powder keg the 60s and 70s were in America. The cold-blooded murder of Fred Hampton is truly shocking… words fail.
Reflecting that in 1976 The Lucas Plan was put together by factory workers to counter proposed job cuts. It was based on notions of socially useful production and included things like heat pumps, wind turbines, energy efficient houses. In 1976!
Forget Running Up That Hill. Kate Bush’s song about Ken Livingstone is clearly her best.
KEN is the
man that we all need
KEN is the
leader of the GLC
I feel happy discovering more and more as I get older that sci-fi books I took off my Mum’s bookshelf as a youngun are in fact often allegorical for some kind of radical politics that I had no idea of at the time.
I like Iain M. Banks and I’m currently re-reading Look to Windward because in Red Plenty it was described it as an example of a 20th century Marxian idyll.
It’s good and all but I’m reading the Culture now as kind of all premised on Prometheanism / fully automated luxury communism.
I’m gonna reread A Wizard of Earthsea (last read as a young teen!) by Ursula K. Le Guin next as in Half-Earth Socialism they describe that as Jennerite, anti-humanisation of nature and that is more my bag lately.
This is a very interesting discussion. The book critiques the UN’s traditional approach of ‘state-building’, i.e. treating what it deems ‘failed states’ as simple machines where you can simply remove the bad part and replace it with a good part and all will be well. The author proposes treating them as complex systems, and ultimately as sites of self-governance, not world-building exercises from the outside.
"There is no such thing as an ungoverned space"
https://newbooksnetwork.com/states-of-disorder-ecosystems-of-governance
Equally fascinating is OSM Landuse Landcover.
Dead interesting to compare urban areas, agriculture and wilderness.
No surprise that near me there is a ton of pasture grazing and crop farming, a bit of urban sprawl, and a depressingly small amount of woodland and forest.
Open Infrastructure Map is absolutely fascinating. Check out all the power stations, turbines, electricity lines, gas, oil, water pipelines, etc are near you. Built on top of Open Street Map data (what an amazing project OSM is).
Meat, money and messaging.
first peer-reviewed and systematic analysis of how the meat industry frames the issue.
"The meat industry fosters uncertainty about scientific consensus and casts doubt over the reliability of both researchers and the evidence, a technique that has been employed by the tobacco, fossil fuel and alcohol industries"
"cherry-picking and misrepresentation of evidence was seen"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919222000173?dgcid=author