Cop City Is The Future They Want, Unwavering Resistance Must Be Our Answer, by Kenn Orphan

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
January 24, 2023

Over this past weekend I went to see the new Avatar movie. I had seen the first one and, although it had flaws, I saw the overall message as compelling. Fair warning, here is a small spoiler: Simply put, the plot is one where humans in the future, with the help of gargantuan and lethal military might, attempt to colonize a planet called Pandora. It is another solar system many light years from earth, and it possesses many extraordinary and rare minerals and resources, as well as incredible biodiversity and Indigenous societies. In the sequel, the humans of earth have returned, and their goal is nothing less than total colonization of the planet for the purpose of resettlement. Earth, as one cold hearted military general says, is dying.

Chris Hedges: Dystopia, Octopus Intelligence, and What Makes Us Human

Image by damn_unique via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

TheRealNews on Oct 7, 2022

In Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea he explores the marine habitat of a hyperintelligent species of octopus, endowed with its own language and culture, is seized by a global tech corporation determined to harness this non-human intelligence for profit in new systems of artificial intelligence.

The Myths of Empire and the Real Message of Dune, by Kenn Orphan

Image by mliu92 via Flickr

by Kenn Orphan
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Halifax, Nova Scotia
August 24, 2021

This fall, the much-awaited remake of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune will hit theatres. Dune tells the complex and multi-layered tale of a feudal interstellar empire in the future, where noble houses compete, often violently, for dominance over the planet Arrakis, a desert world that possesses the only source of a substance called the “spice.” It is essential for space navigation and also has the potential to enhance mental and metaphysical senses and abilities. The imperial powers of the Dune universe use political chicanery and treachery to manipulate various political figures within the noble houses. Arrakis has a desolate and hostile environment. Its inhabitants, the Fremen, are looked down upon by most of the noble houses as savage, inferior and backward. They are the last to see any benefit from the trade of spice, if any at all.

Unplugged For 14 Days by Lo

Image by kamleshmehta via Flickr

by Lo
Editor, Dandelion Salad
October 12, 2019

Had a very unplanned trip to the computer shop and unfortunately it took 2 weeks. I apologize for disappearing so abruptly.

George Orwell’s 1984

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

Originally posted February 7, 2008

Warning

These videos may contain images depicting the reality and horror of war/violence and should only be viewed by a mature audience.

1984 George Orwell (1954)

Emmanuel Goldstein on Sep 26, 2013

BBC Television’s live production of George Orwell’s “1984”. Produced in 1954. Creative Commons license: Public Domain.

Inside the Nefarious and Unethical Worlds of High Finance, Intelligence and MIC by Guadamour

Note: at the publisher’s request this review has been revised

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published, June 13, 2016
Revised version, October 5, 2016

Science fiction deals with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology. Many people are aficionados of science fiction, but what puts many off are when it goes into space/time travel and creates extraterrestrials and other phenomenon difficult for many to wrap their minds around. Science fiction has been called “The Literature of Ideas.” The genre can offer a glimpse into the future, and can be most realistic using the platform of the present and recent past to look into what is ahead. A truly classic example of that is Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Man In The High Tower, where Dick describes what it is like to live in Occupied America after losing WWII to Germany and Japan.

An Epiphany On Wall Street, reviewed by Guadamour

Note: at the publisher’s request this review has been revised

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally published November 24, 2013
Revised version, October 3, 2016

The success or failure of any work of fiction depends to a great extent on the writer’s ability to produce a Suspension of Disbelief in the reader. This is especially true of futurist novels, fantasy, or for lack of a better term, science fiction. The concept was first introduced by the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 in his Biographia Literari. When a work overcomes the barrier of the Suspension of Disbelief, it draws the reader in and takes them into the world created by the author. Such is the case with the book An Epiphany On Wall Street (Author Networks Edition, 2012) by anonym.

Review of Suited For War by Guadamour

Note: Here is the revised version: Inside the Nefarious and Unethical Worlds of High Finance, Intelligence and MIC by Guadamour

by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 13, 2016

Science fiction deals with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology. Many people are aficionados of science fiction, but what puts many off are when it goes into space/time travel and creates extraterrestrials and other phenomenon difficult for many to wrap their minds around. Science fiction has been called “The Literature of Ideas.” The genre can offer a glimpse into the future, and can be most realistic using the platform of the present and recent past to look into what is ahead. A truly classic example of that is Philip K. Dick’s novel, The Man In The High Tower, where Dick describes what it is like to live in Occupied America after losing WWII to Germany and Japan.

Science Fiction Is Over–But The Future Is Now by J. M. Porup

by J. M. Porup
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
www.JMPorup.com
Originally published at wetheborg.com, Dec. 19, 2013
December 23, 2013

Science fiction, and its harness mate, “progress,” both have their roots in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. The sudden technological change was so striking, and had such a profound effect on people’s lives, that the only way to cope was to convince ourselves that these changes were not only good, but necessary. Hence “progress.”

The sheep look down By William Bowles

by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
22 February 2012

The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner’s remarkably prescient ‘science fiction’ novel, first published in 1972 concerns the destruction of the entire environment in the US and the rise of a ‘corporately sponsored government’ leading to the eventual total breakdown of US society.

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner…has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.” William Gibson

Soylent Green (1973)

https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/

Image by Giant Ideas via Flickr

Soylent Green is a 1973 American science fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Charlton Heston, the film overlays the police procedural and science fiction genres as it depicts the investigation into the brutal murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green”.

The film, which is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film in 1973.

[…]

via Soylent Green – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

by Assinoê

*

see

Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy

Toby Hemenway: How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization

Sustainable Food (UCLA Lecture) + Homegrown Revolution

Supermarkets: What Price Cheap Food? (must-see)

Brave New World (1980)

Dandelion Salad

Note: replaced video May 30, 2015

First edition cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

ronald paul on Jan 25, 2012

In a future society based on pleasure without moral worries, love is prohibited but casual sex, now called ‘engaging’, is strongly encouraged. Everyone is kept happy with a legal drug, soma. People are hatched and cloned on conveyor belts to meet the requirements of five different social classes, from ruling Alphas to robot-like Epsilons. Bernard Marx is a different Alpha male with an inclination to thinking. He and a girl called Lenina Disney go visit a reservation of ‘savages’ where they meet a handsome young man John and bring him back to ‘civilization’.

The Sheep Look Up by Gray Brechin

by Gray Brechin
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
July 2, 2010

Arthur C. Clarke and director Peter Hyams proved less than prophetic in the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but they gave the audiences of 1984 what they wanted to hear. Cosmonaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) — who in the movie 2001 disappeared into a mysterious black monolith orbiting Jupiter — reappears as a literally starry-eyed apparition on his widow’s TV set between commercials. He tells her that “something wonderful” is about to happen. It does hours later when exponentially proliferating monoliths send Jupiter critical, igniting a second sun in the solar system. Forewarned by Bowman’s specter, Russian and U.S. cosmonauts hightail it out of the Jovian neighborhood on the cusp of a blast of hot plasma. The two nations at home narrowly avert their own thermonuclear Armageddon. In the closing scene, cosmonaut Heywood Floyd (Roy Schneider) rejoins his wife and son for a happy reunion on the beach under double suns.

Humankind’s future: social and political Utopia or Idiocracy? By Roland Michel Tremblay

By Roland Michel Tremblay
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
The Marginal
1 November, 2009

By some coincidence in the last three days I read Men Like Gods of H. G. Wells and watch the films Idiocracy, City of Ember and WALL-E. They all deal with humankind’s future, a very bleak future that could possibly become the ultimate Utopia or perfect world, not before another world war, the extinction of humanity, and survival of a few humans to come back to Earth from space, or emerging from underground to start anew. Is this what we can expect of our future, imminent self-destruction?

Should we be planning colonies and ship them into space or below ground, like, right now? Is it because we feel the end of humanity is fast becoming, that we are far reaching the end of all our broken institutions, that suddenly the topic of our future, or lack of it, is so pro-eminently featured even in children’s films? The topic is not new, H. G. Wells’ discourse in Men Like Gods is so up to date with what is happening today, even though it was written in 1923, that one must believe nothing has changed socially and politically for the last 100 years.