
J. Richard Singleton
30.3K posts

J. Richard Singleton
@JohnRSingleton
https://t.co/yHNTgeZZSI


On our way to Israel in a few days. Beginning with a visit to Auschwitz to pay our respects.







“Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time,” writes author Xochitl Gonzalez. “With each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.” Part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past, admits Gonzalez. Not in an effort to recapture her youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life. “I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives,” she writes. “But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion.” Read Gonzalez’s full essay: nymag.visitlink.me/55vbET













China's rail system in 25 years jumped two centuries It's the same guy on both photos!






Where do communists get this utter intellectual arrogance from? Have their ideas led them to success? Have they overthrown capitalism in the West through revolution? No. Have they won mass democratic support in free and fair, if bourgeois, elections, where all they have to do is convince people? Also no. And where they did seize power, did they build paradise? No. The Soviet sphere fell in less than one lifetime after decades of shortages, brutal repression, and economic dysfunction, outcompeted by liberal democracy on every front. Where communism persisted, as in China, it had to become capitalist to survive.











