Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman

Tuned in today to "Hay Festival - Rutger Bregman - chaired by Lily Cole - Humankind: A Hopeful History"

Human Tide by Paul Morland

"The Human Tide, How Population Shaped the Modern World" by Paul Morland: the Intro and Chapter 2, The Weight of Numbers, are on Google preview pages - around 50 pages in all.

It is my book group's current choice and I am not impressed. As I wrote on Goodreads:

universal basic income

Following up on my earlier 2019/03/universal-basic-income blog, I just looked up "universal basic income" on the websites of the three big welfare rights charities I used to work for: CPAG, DRUK and Working Families. Searching for "universal basic income" at cpag.org.uk and workingfamilies.org.uk yields no results, while disabilityrightsuk.org does best with its round-up, 18 March 2019, of two new reports about Universal Basic Income. 

Don't Even Think About It by George Marshall

Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall, © 2014, Bloomsbury USA. Read the Chapter Summaries by Jock Gilchrist at climateprotection.org...Dont-Even-Think-About-It-Notes.pdf
More about the book at www.climateconviction.org

Next Book Group on universal basic income

​At last, about 9 years after its inception, this blog may have found its raison d'etre as a record of the Gentle Readers Book Group, established 2014.

Artificial Intelligence or AI

Next Book Group is on the potential impact of AI and technology in society. I recommend these DN! clips.

Pure, white and deadly

Our Feb book group meeting was on health: physical health and the modern medical model. (Prev, we looked at mental health and read Lost Connections by Johann Hari.)

Dark Mountain

We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’.

— Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

This book or collection of essays and stories sounds worth following up. 

Goodreads

Recommended by friend DB of splendid B&B Radnor House in Hay on Wye. 
Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane, published 2003, about the history of the human fascination with mountains

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry: two young soldiers find intimacy amid the horrors of the American civil war

Sacred Hunger, historical novel by Barry Unsworth about the slave trade, 1992 Booker Prize (with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient) 

Book Group on Peace News

Our Next Read is the last 2 issues of Peace News:

• Issue 2624 - 2625 | December 2018 - January 2019, especially on #XR
• Issue 2622 - 2623 | October - November 2018, especially on Transgender issues

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Next Book Group choice (by BB) is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011).

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto

Next Book Group choice (by G) is Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto, published in 2010.

Book Group 2015-2018

Book Group 2015-2018

Murray Bookchin

The Murray Bookchin Reader is available as an ebook at libcom.org and a free audio (MP3) download at www.archive.org, which summarizes it thus:

Lost Connections by Johann Hari

Next month's choice is Lost Connections by Johann Hari (reviewed for example in the Guardian)

Max Planck on dualism and creation

As a postscript to two-miracles, here is Max Planck on dualism and creation. Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory.

Two miracles

There are two miracles which are routinely denied by thinkers whom I otherwise admire and respect who can be termed materialists (or atheists or physicalists). The first miracle is the creation of the universe. The second is human consciousness. I don’t understand how materialists can bring these two phenomena coherently into their system.

Descartes Meditation 6

Finally, in Sixth Meditation, Part 2, Descartes mentions how the mind and body interact:

Cartesian Dualism, Mysterians and miracles

More links for the book group discussion on Cartesian Dualism. Sorry that so many links are to Wikipedia.

Cartesian Dualism and Free Will

This is to inform our book group discussion on Cartesian Dualism. I've added the related topic of Free Will.