Links I Liked

Pandemic literature is surprisingly large – we all know of Camus’ The Plague but this very comprehensive article gives us scores more

I know some of my readers think I’m a bit bonkers when I go on about what you can tell about a book’s author by the sort of bibliography the book offers in its endnotes. But the first part of this extended book review demonstrates precisely my point– identifying curiously missing titles in a bibliography which takes up 80 of almost 700 pages and whose  absence demonstrate conclusively the author’s ideological drift.

The book in question is Eurotragedy – a drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody (2018) which I had been tempted to flick. But the review – by one Otero-Iglesias - has told me enough to know that this is yet one more book I can do without. I was so delighted to find such detective work that I actually wrote to the guy to congratulate him……

It’s some years since I first encountered Adam Curtis - who inspired a post In Praise of the Documentary. I’ve just come across a 3 part series he did on the amazing influence the Rand Corporation had on the world in the 1950s and 60s. They were the number-crunchers “avant la lettre” – with such names as Robert McNamara, Thomas Schelling and MAD (“mutually-assured destruction”) Hermann Kahn    

The series is called Pandora’s Box and can be viewed here; here and here.

One of the ideas they propagated was something we knew as PPBS (“planning, programming, budgetary systems”) which says it all – the belief that everything could be rationally planned…….even the course of the Vietnam War….

McNamara, of course, went from that abject failure to head up The World Bank and inflict huge environmental damage on the world……

The recent Facing Extinction post mentioned in passing one of the key names of the “survivalist” school John Michael Greer who used to have a great blog, some of whose writings can still be found in the Counter Currents website

eg

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer290511A.htm;

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer241111.htm

Just type J Michael Greer in the search engine

Finally, some Seinfeld outtakes