faulker058

This is brilliant. At last one of Britain's fiercest interviewers, John Humphrys, gets his teeth around the Alex Jones conspiracy theory. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/p06jt42s

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge. And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead. In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future. And it could all too easily happen here. There was a ti...

Amazingly, to me at least, who only rises to extreme confidence once in a while, Ecology without Nature now has 1600 scholarly citations, and The Ecological Thought 1200. Hyperobjects is about to reach 1000. Which all means that fairly soon my stuff in general will have been cited 6000 times. But the maddest thing that's ever happened remains the fact that in the first week when Realist Magic was published online (before the print edition showed up), it was downloaded 10 000 times.

“You don't spell out the truth. You imply the truth. Spelling out the truth loses its essence and becomes ‘my’ truth or ‘your’ truth. By implying the truth, the truth does not become anyone's property.”

Someone's doing their job, really really well. https://nyti.ms/2mWMDT8

Everything else! Haha--I've just had one of the very best weeks of recent memory, connecting to my friends here, always good to do that physically. The altitude is mind-adjustingly extreme in the way I remember from having lived here for eight years. I'm very glad about that. California was lovely in its own ways--America is vast, folks who haven't been here or haven't been here a lot, or who have just been to one or two parts of it. But for some reason many of the closest friends ever have been from Boulder.  Is my psychoanalyst of 21 years my friend? Oh, sure, why not. He took a huge shine to Simon (9) who has been a total treat for me and everyone else who's been in his presence. Simon is one of the big reasons this trip has been amazing. My daughter Claire (14) is at a meditation camp in the mountains. I'll find out tomorrow whether it rained too much up there. Simon and I drove up to the highest road in America (well, the highest you can enjoy--another one,...

Kid-unfriendliness, that's what. What a shame, because I came here for the week hoping to have a nice time while my daughter is in meditation camp.  I just posted this review on the Facebook page of a restaurant called Sushi Zanmai:  I used to live in Boulder. I used to love coming to Sushi Zanmai, which I did almost every other week in the later 1990s. I've just had an experience there that has made me realize I can't ever go there again.  I took my son Simon, who is little, to the toilet. The wait staff cleared all our food away.  When I complained to the manager, she tried to make it my fault by saying that I hadn't left something at the table to identify myself. What? My wallet? My $1000 phone?  She tried to tell me that I had been treated well by being given two items of food afterwards--that were part of our original order.  Wow. I'm so sad. I can't possibly go to Sushi Zanmai again. It just goes to show how kid-unfriendly Boulder can be. You can enjo...