What I Just Read

Quite a lot of business insight in here! Useful for general investors as well as real estate investors, with particular value for thinking about investing at different points in an industry cycle or at different points in a general economic cycle. In fact, I'd suggest this book is almost deceivingly full of insight because it's so cleanly written that an inattentive reader can just breeze through it and miss everything. In this way it's like Mohnish Pabrai's excellent book The Dhandho Investor . Don't let the fact that you can burn through the book distract you from the trove of useful horse sense here.  Notes:   * "No one has ever left a meeting with me wondering what I meant." * Zell's parents escaped from Sosnowiec, Poland mere hours before Germany invaded, they traveled east to Lithuania, found a Japanese civil servant who wrote them a transit pass via Japan and Russia to get out of Europe. They were among the "Sugihara survivors" who ma...

Excellent, captivating biography of CIA director Allen Dulles, explaining in disturbing detail how the recent concept of the "administrative state" or the "deep state" is not a new idea, not even close. A modern reader will learn many unfortunate, but important, truths about our country's checkered 20th century history. To be blunt, Allen Dulles inaugurated a new era of lawlessness in the United States, and the CIA, along with many other administrative bureaucracies (the Pentagon, FBI, NSA and many other lettered agencies[*]), now collectively represent tremendous supra-governmental, unelected and unfettered power.  Author David Talbot puts it this way: "Today, other faceless security bureaucrats continue to carry on Dulles's work--playing God with drone strikes from above and utilizing Orwellian surveillance technology that Dulles could have only dreamed about." To anyone who might claim that the idea of the deep state is silly conservative parano...

Note: I read this book more than four years ago, but while reviewing my copy-pastes, notes and thoughts from the text I thought I'd publish them here for others to use or share. Enjoy! ********************************** x "Life is Practice" Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm? 'Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!' Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born, and not for work, not for effort? Look at the plants, the sparrows, ants, spiders, bees, all busy at their own tasks, each doing his part towards a coherent world-order; and will you refuse man's share of the work, instead of being prompt to carry out Nature's bidding? ... You have no real love for yourself; if you had, you would love your nature, and your nature's will. Craftsmen who love their trade will spend themselves to the utmost in laboring at it, even going unwashed and unfed; but you held your nature in less regard than the engr...