notanotherbookreview

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS beautifully resurrects "Both an extraordinary 1930s text on anarchism in its original sense of liberatory principles of equality and mutual support, and short chapters with all age-appropriate illustrations and explanations of each principle. This book is certainly for progressive parents and their children."   “Help: To those who hesitate, give them encouragement: to those who despair of seeing victory far away, give them courage. Mutual help is a sacred and universal duty.” "Anarchy is a political and social state characterized by the absence of government, hierarchy, or enforced authority. It emphasizes voluntary cooperation, individual autonomy, and mutual aid rather than coercive rule. While often associated with chaos, proponents see it as a self-organized, free society."--wikipedia What is Anarchy? In my education,  Anarchy w as a political philosophy for crazy people, like the Russian who infamously rolled marbles across a stage during ...

  Where does fact meet fantasy in a history of the information age, and in a fantasy novel of  magical systems? Fancy Bear Goes Phishing:The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro (Macmillan) confirmed my suspicions that the online world is more chaotic and dangerous than I expected. What happened to computer science, once a visionary frontier of knowledge? In the beginning academia and the defense industry fostered the new area.  The idea was thinking machines would enable human advancement and make our nation safer. With unique access to talent and technology, computer science departments were galvanized for an exciting future. So where did the hackers come in? Author Shapiro (Professor of Law and Philosophy at Yale and Director of the Yale Center for Law and Philosophy, as well as Yale's Cyber Security Lab) explains how "hacker" was once a complimentary term, meaning a rare creative thinker able to write code to make somethi...

Here are the links to the podcast of Shrink-Wrap Radio's, David Van Nuys Interview with Greg Mahr and Chris L.Drake https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp_G5OLuPew/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY= https://shrinkrapradio.com/838-greg-mahr-and-chris-drake-on-the-wisdom-of-dreams-science-synchronicity-and-the-language-of-the-soul/ The Bhavachakra or Wheel of Life.  Y ama is the monstrous being holding the wheel in his hooves. Lord of the Hell Realms, he represents death and impermanence. Dreaming in Tibetan culture Bon is the original, pre-Buddhist faith of the Tibetan people, and Dzogchen Yoga is the highest form of Bon teachings. For centuries, Bon evolved and blended with a form of Buddhism called Vajrayana. Both Tibetan Buddhism and Bon coexist in the Himalayan region and in the Tibetan diaspora, and both acknowledge the important role of Dalai Lama as a religious and political leader.  Dreaming is greatly valued in Tibetan culture, as is what we would call the unconscious ( Rinpoche, 1998 )...

      For some perspective on women's rights in the U.S., which were derived from English law--changed in Britain in 1839. Black men in the U.S. had the right to vote in 1870. White women in 1920 and black women not until the voting right act of 1965. Women's rights had little precedent in English law until Caroline Norton set a new precedent in 1839 (during Victoria's reign) with a mother's legal right to have access to her children. Before that time, Caroline, like all women, was a legal nonentity. Husbands and fathers represented them. (Spinsters, who could inherit if no male relatives, had more status then married women) Nonentity means no legal precedent existed for women's rights in England. If a man beat his wife or broke her arm (like Caroline's husband), the matter was not considered a crime. Unless a woman was killed, domestic violence was private. Some men thought it helped woman's behavior to be "knocked around." Wages or inherited mone...

MASS : A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest by Jo Scott-Coe (April 4, Pelekinesis) With the disturbing acceleration of mass murder shootings, it's easy to forget the first big one. On August 1, 1966, Charles  Whitman, after slaying his wife and mother, climbed the clock tower at UT Austin and shot about 50 people, including the fetus of a pregnant woman. His was the first televised mass shooting and "domestic terror" spectacle in American history. Twisted, mentally ill, yet, as author Jo Scott-Coe shows in MASS : A Sniper, a Father, and a Priest , mass murderers don't develop in a vacuum.  In this deeply researched nonfiction, she traces Whitman's path from his childhood with a violent authoritarian father, brutalized mother, and two younger siblings, also struggling to survive. In this "all American" family the father had a plumbing business, the mother did the accounts and catered to his many edicts, while trying to raise their children to become d...

THE LYNCHING: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan  (William Morrow Hardcover) is an exciting and impressive read, a page turner that is also a history of a pivotal event in the Civil Rights struggle. As a Northerner, the Southern attachment to slavery and later segregation, as part of "traditional values" has always been a personal disconnect. I once publicized Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan by Daryl Davis, a Grammy award winning musician, who risked his life on a mission to understand hate. Were these people monsters or would he find a common humanity? Davis found shared ground but didn't address the origins of hate crimes. In Laurence Leamer's THE LYNCHING, racial hatred is explained in the context of the personal histories of those involved in a horrific hate crime in 1981, when Jim Crow was a fading memory. The incident was sparked by a trial of a black man accused of murdering a white Police Sergea...