The big news this week so far is the defeat of Victor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary and been a spiritual leader for the worldwide Christian Nationalism movement that has been so embraced by the American Right Wing and MAGA movements. Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian elections on Sunday April 12, two days ago. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide two-thirds majority, securing 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6% of the…
Back in early 2018 I was trying to drive a start-up in the ammonia synthesis business. It was one of those strange gigs in my later career that is hard to explain in hindsight, but seemed to make sense at the time. The technology we were championing was potentially earthshaking. I do not make that statement lightly. Ammonia is arguably the most consequentially important industrial chemical in human history… the case for that is strong.…
When I was just clicking into my teens and living in Maine, noted academic and author, J.R.R. Tolkien was about the age I am now. Besides being an Oxford Don (twice over), he had already written The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in the following 17 years after that. Tolkien’s Rise to popularity developed in waves with his early reception through the war years for The Hobbit thought of as a…
As I keep listening to The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have been fascinated by the devolution of violence, both historically and culturally. It’s a fascinating listen/read and I will again highly recommend it to anyone who has a curiosity like mine for sociological and cultural issues and trends that both explain aspects of our universe and help me understand why the world isn’t as genteel as I wish it were…or why maybe I’m…
Towards the end of listening to 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, he references Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I’ve heard of Pinker’s book, but never read it and there was an upcoming opening on my Audible dance card, so I downloaded the book and have started listening to it. Notably, Pinker wrote the book in 2011, fifteen years ago. In it, he argues that, despite widespread perception to…
When I think of the world’s ills, social media goes right to the top of the list. That’s actually a pretty startling thing to say given what’s happening across the world at the moment. The truly existential and long-term risks to the world should start with climate change and the documented, slow-moving crisis that it portends. The physical consequences like rising seas, intensifying storms, prolonged droughts, ecosystem collapse, and mass displacement are already underway and…
When the term “tribal warfare” has come up, I have always thought of Africa for some reason. When I was traveling to subsaharan Africa almost forty years ago, I was surprised to learn about how much inter-tribe rivalry existed and what a storied history and debate there was about how prevalent it was in the context particularly of a continent beset with a turbulent colonial past and then as a source of the Western Hemisphere’s…
Drone warfare refers to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct surveillance, reconnaissance, and lethal strike missions, often remotely piloted from thousands of miles away. When I think about drone warfare I think about the movie Eye in the Sky (2015), arguably the best fictional treatment of drone ethics. Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman star in a tense real-time drama about a strike decision with civilian collateral risk. It was excellent on the…
The United States Marine Corps has one of the most storied histories in American military service, spanning over 250 years. The Marines were established in 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized two battalions of Marines to serve as a landing force for the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. The first Marines were recruited at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, a date and place still celebrated in Corps tradition. After the Revolution, the Corps was briefly…
Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…