Longer version of my Ames article, focusing also on Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), founder of CovertAction, John Walker, even Bowe Bergdahl. Spying, traitors come in bizarre forms.
Longer version of my Ames article, focusing also on Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975), founder of CovertAction, John Walker, even Bowe Bergdahl. Spying, traitors come in bizarre forms.
What ever happened to good old-fashion spying? The Saint? James Bond? Spy mania seems to have come (with 19th c imperialism) and gone (with the collapse of the Soviet Union). In our neoliberal age, with no monolith Bad Guy, spying is mostly about stealing money. Now a high school nerd in Rumania or a clever North Korean might decide to hack, say, banks.
Biden's Cyber Safety Review Board at Homeland Security's first spy-catching assignment was to investigate how Lapsus$, an international teen extortion racket 'impacted some of the biggest companies in the world, in some cases, with relatively unsophisticated techniques.'
Conspiracy is not the way out of our deadend, nor is quasi-Marxist wokeness. Huxley's vision is new-old, a rediscovery of spirit-soul, the other dimension in life denied in our age of scientism. Simple truths which are found in all the great religions, but have been shelved, blinded as we are by the dazzling smoke and mirrors of technology.
Grandson of Thomas Huxley, notorious critic who declared Darwinism was becoming a religion, a cult, younger brother of Julian Huxley, atheist and popularizer of science, Aldous trumps them with his quiet pacifism, his spiritual quest, looking for truths in the ancient past, not the slick, exciting world of atomic bombs and miracle cures. What's the point, if we are doomed to extinction through world war?
A prophet is a translator (mutarjim) of the workings of sacred imagination. The prophet Muhammad (pbuh*) conveyed the messages he channeled into 'the recitation/ reading', the Quran. Unlike the Bible, which claims (along with The communist manifesto) to be the most widely distributed book, the Quran is the most read, the most recited, the most memorized book. What accounts for the enduring popularity of the Quran?
Cosmopolitan -- 'world politics', 'world citizen' -- people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don't cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That's what democracy and freedom are all about, right?
But is the apparent real?
In 2018, a majority of millennials said boomers had ‘made things worse’ for their generation. They tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.
In all fields touched by the six boomers profiled here---technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, law---what they passed on to their children was worse than what they inherited.
Andrews is senior editor at The American Conservative, and her book is a jeremiad, with the flavour of Old Testament divine justice, a call for owning up to one’s sins. The sins are many and the style is refreshingly unapologetically angry. The boomers should not be allowed to shuffle off the world stage until they have been made to regret their actions… In a just world there would be cosmic retribution for taking Jobs’s life’s work and turning it to the most boomerish purposes imaginable.
Over time I have accumulated 'my favourite Shakespeare hits' as doses of vitamin, my protein drink, as I ride. I love to find the bull's eyes and implant them, so they can come to my aid. Reciting aloud or in my mind is like playing Beethoven on the piano. Imitating speech (and song) is what makes us humans, gives us the miracle of speech. It's our primary learning engine. Parrots, mocking birds and a few others can, but no primates. It is speech that has turned the world into our world, transforming nature into ... No comment. But there is no wordsmith to rival the Bard. Maybe Dante.
Tolstoy didn't like Shakespeare: irreligious, amoral, teaches that in morality, like politics, you can’t establish any principles because life is too complex. The Devil is the main protagonist in Shakespeare's great tragedies, which suits me fine,
I sit here, serenaded by our neighbourrhood nice crazy (as opposed to the many very irritating ones. CAMH is just across the road). He’s probably 3 blocks away and his plaintiff tenor wafts through the air. I saw him singing fortissimo a few days ago, as he skateboarded over the college st trolley tracks in the busy traffic, his head high, dressed for modest but tasteful street living, the spitting image of Jake Angeli, the Siegmund parody among the jan6 invaders of the capitol.
Western Sahara is alive and kicking despite Trump's 'deal of the century'.
World News with Eric Walberg