Life People Sounds

Chuck Berry, Dead at 90

The father of Rock’n’Roll is no more.  Chuck Berry passed away peacefully at his home yesterday.  Charles Edward Anderson Berry, better known as Chuck Berry, was born into a middle-class African-American family in St Louis, Missouri. He first rose to fame in the 1950s with songs such as “Maybellene” and “Rock and Roll Music”. In […]

Brexit Government

Borders & Bad Old Days

Interesting article over on the New European ( “Don’t send Ireland back to division” ), exploring the implications for Ireland, particularly highlighting the impact it will have on the Good Friday agreement. The UK Government is giving all the appearances of wilfully ignoring the issues. There’s a lot of idealism amongst the ‘Brexiteers’, it seems to […]

Freedoms Government Trumperica

Yonatan Zunger – What things going wrong can look like

In Trumpistan, Yonatan Zunger had a guess at how things might play out (https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/what-things-going-wrong-can-look-like-400f84a0cc3a#.yyni3tha1): On a recent post I made about how President Trump marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, one of my readers asked a good, but hard, question: Why did this regime single out some particular groups (e.g., Muslims, Latinos, Black, and Trans people) as […]

Human Rights Society the peasants are revolting Trumperica

Surviving Autocracy

Marsha Gessen wrote a set of six rules for surviving an autocracy back in November 2016 ( http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/ ). Well worth a revisit in light of recent events, they’ve stood the test of the last few months anyway. Sample: I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about […]