Tag: politics

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Can leaders steer the course of history

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American scientist, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Jared Diamond poses the big question whether leaders or luck play a greater part in steering the course of history. In Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, Diamond announces at the start that he will pursue a middle path- more realistic than taking one side, but a warning that what follows will fall short of a resounding theory. Researching the life of one striking individual creates a temptation to attribute more influence to them than is justified. Inspired by the rigour of laboratory scientists using controls, he cites as a natural experiment- thrown up by … Continue reading Can leaders steer the course of history

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Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

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Roy Cohen is a super-lawyer and political fixed, whose shocking exploits over four decades have shaped the modern political era, most prominently the ascent of Donald Trump. In October 1973, Donald Trump was an ambitious 27-year-old from Queens trying to push his way into the world of Manhattan real estate. He met Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer whose clients included mobsters and celebrities, one evening at the members-only Le Club Restaurant. Trump and his developer father had just been sued by the US government for discriminating against Black people seeking apartments in their properties. Trump asked Cohn “What … Continue reading Cohn’s feistiness, surly defiance and charm of a rogue lawyer

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New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

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Sinologist at the University of Cambridge, Hans van de Ven, in Blood Dawn, complains while Western histories of the second World War, focuses on the events in Europe, the US and the Russia, Asia remains “insufficiently examined, inadequately narrated, and rarely remembered in public discourse”.  In Blood Dawn, he offers a vital corrective restoring the Asian war to its proper place, and tracing the destruction of empires and the emergence of the nation-state in Asia. van de Ven tells the Asian story deftly, including the depression which helped finish off the parliamentary experiment of Taisho democracy in Japan, empowering soldiers for … Continue reading New Dawn: Imperial wreckage, war’s chaos, and suffering supercharged anti-colonial movements

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Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Amid women facing backlashes across the world, growing dangers for women, as their safety is being threatened and their freedoms are under attack, with authoritarian states, online misogyny and climate breakdown, wildfires burning in Europe and drought ravages harvests and apocalyptic summer of 2026. Academic and activist author Natasha Walter after decades of her advocacy work alongside refugee women: “When heat rises, so does male violence. The ecological crisis is amplifying every threat to women. Women’s bodies and the body of the earth in danger at one on the same time.” She wrote, The New Feminism ( 1998), an upbeat, … Continue reading Engage with the place to tend and to mend

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Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

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Kim Phillips-Fein, historian teaching 20th century American history at the Gallatin School of individualized Study at New York University, in Country of Lords, chronicles a “Shadow Tradition” who fought against America’s founding ideals, offers a critical re-examination of American history by focusing on inequality.  She challenges the belief that America has always moved greater equality, a persistent “Shadow tradition of anti-egalitarian thought published amid sharp anxiety over extreme wealth concentration. 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the book argues that doubts about equality run from John Adams through social Darwinists, slavery theorists and scientific racist to today’s tech elite Elon Musk’s … Continue reading Inequality linking of concentrated wealth, inherited hierarchy to the ideology of tech titans

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Algorithms pump toxin content at users of misuse personal data

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Make Tech products and services with safety, privacy and autonomy Sir Kier Starmer’s announcement to ban social media for under 16s, echoing measures in Australia that took effect in December. France, Austria and Spain are among other countries planning similar restriction. Beeban Kidron’s Users, is about a inspired global debate on smartphones rewiring children’s brains and links to poor mental health shows Users catching the Zeitgeist. Baroness Kidron has been campaigning for tech safety, regulation, and children’s rights for over a decade. In her book, she describes the move from a successful career directing films, including Bridget Jones: The Edge … Continue reading Algorithms pump toxin content at users of misuse personal data

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Grace is out making way for rage and fury

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Communion is an intimate account of why Vice President JD Vance strayed from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to faith. JD Vance was brought up to believe in God. In Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made him famous, he wrote of how, aged six his biological father told him that he had asked God for signs that an adoption was in JD’s interest. “Those signs apparently appeared, and I became the legal son of Bob, a man I’d known for barely a year.” Vance was mostly brought up by his grandmother, “Mamaw”, who felt she … Continue reading Grace is out making way for rage and fury

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Global economic reset

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Dennis Peacocke’s On The Destiny of Nations is designed to provoke a global reaction and a movement especially among leaders, which will help prepare and position people for once-in-a-century opportunity to advance God’s Kingdom amidst a major political-economic crisis lasting perhaps a decade. This is no mere recession, but the beginning stages of a global economic reset that will bring major disruptions and changes over the coming decade. The secular marginalisation of Judeo-Christian values from the public dialogue has helped drive this collapse by creating a values-vacuum prompting massive corruption throughout the financial management systems. Neither capitalism no any other economic … Continue reading Global economic reset

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Politicians who had lost the plot

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San Francisco’s meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom nearly engineered its collapse. San Francisco’s Doom since the Gold Rush of 1849 and Bust loop after the pandemic when business flight and surging homelessness appeared to threaten irreversible urban decline.  At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy struck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later … Continue reading Politicians who had lost the plot

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Scramble to control precious metals

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The Elements of Power is a tale of rapacious colonialism, war for the global supply of battery metals- essential for the decarbonization of our economies- and the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry and Cold War spy games, dazzling technical innovation, big business rivalry, big power geopolitics. Niarchos produced an unfinching, landmark work on the nature of extractive capitalism. Congo is rich amid swaths of the war-ton African country lack basic infrastructure and after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soild are vast quantities … Continue reading Scramble to control precious metals