No Comment: Philip Smith ‘Bonfire Wars’
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2019November
Public Intellectual Series: George Orwell – A Crucial Man for Our Time
George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His writing, best represented by his many essays on a variety of subjects, rather than the more celebrated novels, presage in myriad ways the problems we face today. Those famous novels 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are visionary works depicting … Read more
Refugee Education: Can We Regenerate Lost Generations?
The future of a generation born during over eight years of conflict in Syria is under threat. More than half of all school-aged Syrian children living as refugees in neighbouring countries do not enjoy access to a formal education. In this two-part series humanitarian activist and author Bruna Kadletz addresses a global educational crisis for … Read more
Cora Venus Lunny Launches New Album ‘Numinous Soup’
Numinous Soup is an album I quietly made by myself in my spare room on child free evenings, releasing mp3s on Patreon as they became ready and eventually combining my favourite tracks into this collection. ‘Mindsomereve’ is something I made almost absentmindedly, and didn’t think was finished, but as I kept listening to it to … Read more
‘A slap in the face to bus users’ – Dublin Commuter Coalition responds to proposal to allow EVs in bus lanes
In a press release, the ‘Dublin Commuter Coalition’ has described proposals for electric vehicles to be permitted to use bus lanes[i] as a ‘slap in the face to bus users.’ This demonstrates, they claim: ‘a stunning lack of respect for overstretched users of sustainable transport.’ The civil society organisation reject: [I]n the strongest possible terms, … Read more
Poetry – Mark Burrows
The Resistance I never knew what they really felt how they survived the one world we shared across layers of fear and indifference never grasped the bold grip of hatred that sears the eye and numbs the mind of the last shreds of decency never expected that the good would outlast all this in a … Read more
Himself and the Little People
That summer of 1974 for the first time in my young life I felt proud of myself. For after one very hard week of sweat work, I stood admiring my big bank of black Tore bog turf drying in the hot sun. It was a great feeling and no one was mocking me now. Little … Read more
The Conman and Correspondence with Kurt Vonnegut
I admire old people who live by their wits, like the ancient American, a real estate man, whom I met in Galway years. He wore a badge on his lapel with the slogan: OLD AGE AND CUNNING WILL ALWAYS DEFEAT YOUTH AND TALENT. He told me he was eighty. He looked sixty. We had some … Read more
David Cameron and the Origins of Brexit
In 2015 comic Frankie Boyle penned a darkly titled article ‘What if David Cameron is an evil genius?’ Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Boyle – citing plans to erase the Human Rights Act from U.K. law – wondered whether Cameron was, ‘A shrewd and malevolent psychopath who thinks two moves deeper into the game than any … Read more
‘Economic theory changes one funeral at a time’ – An Interview with Warren Mosler on the True Nature of Money
It’s the grease that makes the economic wheels turn. But ask where your taxes go after you pay them; or how a bank makes a loan; or what it means when you hear central banks are ‘printing money,’ and you’ll get different answers depending on who you talk to. Why should you care? Because a … Read more