The Nomad and the Olive Branch

  1984. Brave New World. These two literary works have re-defined the term "dystopia" at the turn of the 20th Century. However, another book, just as known and reputable, Fahrenheit 451, authored by one of the most creative writers America let alone the world has ever seen, has breathed life into this otherwise dank and dreary conception. The book is titled after "the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns." Unlike its older counterparts, it is shorter in length (about 160 pages) and is set in a world where intellectual thought is actively (and violently) suppressed and entertainment in all its forms is encouraged. The story follows Guy Montag, a "fireman" (I'll leave the word at that) who lives in this dark and gloomy future. Without spoiling too much, he gets caught in a series of events that unravel the flaws of his era. Having read 1984 and excerpts of Brave New World, I am pleased to say that Bradbury's work, despite i...

Touted as the "best-selling science fiction franchise of all time", the Dune chronicles is a space opera double-trilogy or hexology set in a future thousands of years from now, where artificial intelligence is shunned and the Imperium of all mankind in the galaxy lives by a single maxim: "Man can not be replaced." After an event known as the Butlerian Jihad ousted the alliance between man and machine (or rather the control of machines over men), humanity came under the control of feudal societies in a region of space known as the Landsraad. Three of these Houses - Atreides, Harkonnen, and Corrino - take center stage as the powers vying for control, with so-called neutral factions - the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild - aligning themselves with whosoever provides them with the geriatric spice Melange, a condiment that grants prescient powers to its wielders such as foresight to the Navigators of the Spacing Guild. The hexology as a whole is brilliantly set...

Few trilogies espouse a universe so encompassing, engrossing, engaging, and breathtaking as Mass Effect, a franchise that combines the best of classic space opera and traditional science fiction elements such as cyberpunk and Lovecraftian horror into one genre-defying masterpiece that draws influence from media greats such as Blade Runner, Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Deus Ex. The trilogy was an absolute blast to play, with its story of memorable characters, beautiful locales, and myriad social, political, and religious themes. It is no surprise that it is deemed as one of the greatest if not the greatest science fiction franchise of our generation . It comes to no surprise that a universe this big has other products. They already have an animated movie being released and have published several Dark Horse comics to date. While tie-in novels are considered supplementary and not stand-alones, this set of books deserves special mention for several reasons. First, the books are...

This is the first post in a series of posts that deals with books I have read or come across. The first book to receive this treatment is "A History of the Arab Peoples" by the late Lebanese scholar Albert Hourani. I finished reading this book about a year ago and I remember feeling somewhat underwhelmed by its premise. The book serves as an excellent primer to Arabs at the advent of Islam, but falls short of giving us as detailed a history as possible about Arabs prior to the coming of the world's second largest religious group. It seems to run on the hypothesis that modern Arab history started with the coming of Islam, and that the Arabs have had no history prior to this. The same has been said of the Palestinians, who are accused of having no history prior to 1948. The presence of a people and the socio-political climate that governed them in the past is just as important as the one in the present. In fact, it can be argued that much of what we see in Arab society...

Ever since man invented the wheel, technology as a whole has advanced farther than any of us can ever fathom. The wheel became the cart and the cart became the chariot and the chariot became the carriage and the carriage became the car. The glider got an engine which took it to space. The brick oven started to run on electricity and not on gas. Not long after, it also got the power to emit microwave radiation and the chance to blow up bowls of spaghetti. The pen gave way to the typewriter, and ENIAC gave way to the laptop computer. Writing on stone was later inscribed on leaves, papyrus, paper, and the Word document. Indeed, it would seem that technology has become almost synonymous with human progress. As much as some tried to use that technology to benefit the working man's daily life, much of it has been done for the sole purpose of ruining it altogether, and I'm not just talking about taxes and the mail delivery system. I'm talking about the other thing in life that...

A common yet grave fallacy is to assume that (the actions of) (part of) the infrastructure of a particular country at a particular time and place is derived from a singular cause, of which a metaphysical nature attributed to said cause would be even more so. That said, attributing (a perception of) (failed) politics as an "outflow" of a country's culture is in my honest opinion a crock of bull. I'm not denying that culture and politics are related: there clearly is a relationship between the two in the broader historical context. However, this reductionist outlook panders to more than your garden variety racism, itself being built on misinterpretations and misunderstandings. Why is that? First of all, consider that politics and culture are mutually exclusive concepts, although their definitions may not appear to be so on the surface. Politics (according to the pseudo-omniscient Wikipedia [1] ) is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The...

The state of human affairs over the past decade have overall not been taking a turn for the better. War, violence, scandal, shallow gossip, tragedy, and other profit-generating stories congest newspaper headlines and the nightly broadcasts. With the recent economic crises, things aren't looking up, either. As the human population on Earth grows ever so nearer to the carrying capacity, humanity as a whole seems to be taking a downhill swerve... ...or is it? There is at least 1 or 2 in 10 people out there who have heard about the recent story regarding the Chilean miners. Being trapped for at least 15 days underground about 2 months ago, almost no one was sure that they were going to survive. The lack of oxygen, food, and water would surely deprive them of life if the toxic gases, ash, soot, and dust didn't choke them to death first. Around the world, many people watched and, when news of them still being alive 17 agonizing days after the entrapment surfaced ( "All 33 of...

by Jeremy Hammond; June 7, 2010 A proper understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires exposing numerous myths about its origins and the reasons it persists. Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region. Although Arabs were a majority in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel, there had always been a Jewish population, as well. For the most part, Jewish Palestinians got along with their Arab neighbors. This began to change with the onset of the Zionist movement, because the Zionists rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and wanted Palestine for their own, to create a “Jewish State” in a region where Arabs were the majority and owned most of the land. For instance, after a series of riots in Jaffa in 1921 resulting in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, the occupying British held a commission of inquiry, which reported their finding that “there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or ...