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Subscribe now Unfortunately, I just discovered Lee “Scratch” Perry died last summer. Not sure how I missed it, but he deserves recognition. Perry is responsible as any other single person for the sound of much music heard today. He was madly influential in developing reggae and then what became rap,
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Webster: robust adjective 1D: capable of performing without failure under a wide range of conditions In the last few years, we found, and now seemingly look to explore to the point of exhaustion, the present corporate globalization system is not very robust. Centrally controlled and structured systems, dependent on certain
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Subscribe now Oil hit a $100 a barrel last week, touching a $140 last night. The price of oil first hit a $100 in 2007, preceding and in some ways precipitating the financial crisis of 2008. When oil hit a hundred, the US economy went into recession in the last
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For some reason FT's is doing these Turner black & white colorizations of Ukraine photos: Had to do a double take: This is Husker Du's 1984 Zen Arcade and that's Saint Paul, Minneapolis not 2022 Russian bombed Ukraine. A very, very fine collection of
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Subscribe now In the last decades, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life has been pigeonholed in a way precluding a true understanding of his legacy. A radical, thoughtful, and purposeful life of action has been whittled down to one or two statements from one speech. This is not simply
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. It needs your monetary support and help in distribution to others to continue. The loss of history has been a major blow for any useful politics. For millennia, human culture was largely defined by our history. Ancestors actions, the past was
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Subscribe now Historian Gore Vidal conveys from the writings of Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State in 1950, State officials figured the average American might think about world affairs, “For ten minutes in any given day.” That’s extremely generous. Whatever small number it is has allowed 75 years
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Subscribe now There are numerous advantages to republican systems, however, they have never proved more peaceable than dictatorships or monarchies, maybe even less so. Renaissance Italy saw unending strife amongst her city-state republics. While Rome, and its modern US successor, militarily created two of history's greatest empires. In
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Subscribe now It's sort of interesting with the brouhaha the US National Security State helped instigate in Eastern Europe, there's been little talk of atomic weapons. After all, it was the key ingredient in all Cold War fear mongering. Any action could quickly spark nuclear apocalypse,
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Subscribe now Half-century ago, technology historian Marshall McLuhan said the computer was creating information storage and retrieval capabilities far beyond anything humanity has ever known. He was right. I was searching around for some electricity numbers and came across this, the International Energy Agency’s, “World Energy Investment 2020” with
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Subscribe now I practice self-deception by patting myself on the back about no longer following the unentertaining circus that is American politics. Occasionally, when I am honest with myself, I realize I pay a lot more attention than the average American. This especially comes home after reading, for the first
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Subscribe now I forgot about this collaboration with Misters Zevon and Springsteen. Disorder in the house Reptile wisdom Zombies on the lawn staggering around Disorder in the house There's a flaw in the system And the fly in the ointment's gonna bring the whole thing down