tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-890754564283430222024-03-25T05:27:33.242-07:00What I Just ReadBook Reviews, Reading ListsDanielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comBlogger212125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-54003438070016795562024-03-15T13:59:00.000-07:002024-03-16T07:13:30.073-07:00Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon [Commissario Brunetti #2] [review short: no spoilers]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">Another competently written mystery from Donna Leon. I'd recommend this book--and series--to any Italophile, especially if you're curious about Venice.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is the second "Brunetti" novel, and it starts with a dead man floating in one of Venice's canals: young, an American (the Italians could tell by his teeth), with a professional-looking knife wound, through his ribs into his heart. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The mystery deepens when Brunetti discovers the victim is from the US military, stationed at the American army base in Vicenza. And when Brunetti meets his superior officer, she strangely gives off an almost animal terror at learning of his death. Worse, she dies by a clearly staged "suicide" shortly thereafter. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is a story about corruption, a theme explored in Brunetti #1 as well, but here it runs much deeper, to an international level: where those engaging in the corruption can't be touched and where the individual is powerless to stop it. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">I wonder if it's a coincidence that I happened to finish this 1992 novel just days after an important Boeing whistleblower unexpectedly "committed suicide" amidst serious allegations of shoddy safety and engineering practices at the company. I wonder. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>* Caffe corretto</i>: black coffee with a substantial splash of grappa. Some of the characters will have this with their first coffee in the morning. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On the filthy canal water in Venice: Brunetti used to swim in it, today he jokes that "falling into a canal was an experience he prefer not to survive."; and he knew of older people when he was a child who used to use the salty water of the canal to cook because salt was an expensive and heavily taxed commodity, and the Venetians were quite poor back then.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On the themes of the Americanization of Italy: both in the cultural sense, but also via direct "colonization" of Italy via American military bases.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On the Italian perception of Americans: "At a desk just inside the door, to the right, set a young woman who could only be American... her teeth had that perfection common to most Americans and to the wealthiest Italians. She turned to him with a bright smile; her mouth turned up at the corners, but her eyes remained curiously expressionless and flat."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* It's interesting to see Patta, Brunetti's superior officer, who is politically connected and has pretensions to join the upper class of Italian society. He's a flat character but the reader quickly grows accustomed to the dynamic between Patta and Brunetti; the author usually pairs their dialogue with a fair amount of sarcastic internal mental commentary in Brunetti's head.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Brunetti's wealthy father-in-law serves as a deus ex machina in this story, he knows everything about the various political intrigues of the country and with a phone call he can protect someone, figure out who's doing what, etc. He reminds me of Sato from the movie <i>Inception</i>, implausibly able to clear the way for Leonardo DiCaprio's character to enter the US with a mere phone call, just minutes before he enters Customs.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Finally a paradox on living in and around endemic corruption: different characters are at different Kubler-Ross stages of grief about the various levels of corruption in Italy: Brunetti, as a police detective and a lifetime Venetian is in the stage of "acceptance" with much of Venice's endemic local corruption; it's normal to him. But he's somewhere between anger and despair with this much deeper, much more vile international corruption. His wealthy father-in-law on the other hand seems to understand and accept the truth of the deep corruption of his country, and yet he wants his daughter and son-in-law and his grandchildren to somehow maintain some level of innocence, avoid his deep cynicism about it. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-20726934464293574032024-03-09T05:37:00.000-08:002024-03-10T17:53:15.433-07:00The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey B. Neill<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">The central idea of <i>The Art of Contrary Thinking</i> is to accept, humbly, that most opinions are ill-formed--including our own. Opinions are emotional, imitative, and usually driven by contagion, either from other people or from propaganda. Worst of all, opinions are usually built upon embarrassingly little thought, yet we aggressively defend, justify and rationalize them. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The practice of contrary thinking "is a way out" as the author puts it. The techniques of contrary thinking range from automatically adopting the opposing belief, to reversing the arrow of cause and effect, to flipping a problem around several different ways to consider it from several angles.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">In other words, this book teaches you to install a deceptively simple, preemptive subroutine into your thinking--a <i>near-miraculous</i> subroutine that automatically causes you to resist herd thinking, prompts you to seek opportunity where none seems apparent, and even helps you resist propaganda.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Charlie Munger, one of my investing idols, frequently used the phrase "Invert, always invert!" which tightens the essential ideas of this book down to three words. Investment writer Cody Willard uses an even tighter verbal prompt with his phrase "flip it." Both expressions act as cues to think in a contrary way: to change around your perspective or assumptions to get you to think more deeply. In investing, remember, there is <i>always</i> somebody on the other side of your trade. If you're buying a stock, by definition someone else is selling. <i>So what is that guy thinking?</i> If you can't flip around an investment idea and rigorously consider all the contra-arguments, you'll be quickly and rudely separated from your money. </div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Author Humphrey B. Neill goes so far as to say that if you become a contrary thinker "you become more contented in your everyday life, and more relaxed in your thinking." It's true! Once you realize, deeply, how malnourished your (and everyone else's) thinking really is, you start to form far fewer opinions. You start to make far fewer predictions--which, if we're really honest with ourselves, are just going to be opinions that we misremember in the future so they match the reality that actually happened. Thus it trains you away from falling in love with your thoughts, predictions and opinions, <i>and therefore helps you adapt more quickly and efficiently to reality.</i></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Best of all, it frees you from the traps of others' opinions and predictions too. It's like a delicious red pill that helps you tune out (or as we would say in the investment world, "fade") the entire punditocracy. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is a goddamn Swiss army knife of thinking.</div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div><div dir="auto">A word of caution: people may interpret contrary thinking as a lazy form of automatic disagreement (thus the expression "a knee-jerk contrarian," which is one of the more condescending things you can be called on Wall Street). In fact a genuinely cynical reader might say it's a thinking habit that presumes people are idiots. But I'd counsel readers instead to see contrary thinking as a sort of fundamentals drill like you'd use in a sport: think of it like a mental kata that you practice every day, to avoid the all-too-common habit of thinking that you're thinking when you're not.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>The Art of Contrary Thinking</i> can be repetitive: it's a collection of short essays, and from time to time they touch on similar ideas. But <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/j-is-for-junk-economics-by-michael.html" target="_blank">as with other books reviewed on this site, this repetition is a help and a blessing</a>: it helps you groove the ideas and techniques, making them natural and habitual. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, the author offers readers a wonderful reading list over the course of the book through various little comments dropped throughout the text ("make sure you get a copy" of that book, or "this wonderful book is hard to find," and so on). I've assembled all the recommended titles into a convenient list at the end of this post.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><b>1: "Sameness of thinking is a natural attribute... Obvious thinking--or thinking the same way in which everyone else is thinking--commonly leads to wrong judgments and wrong conclusions." Thus the epigram "When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong."</b><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2: On distinguishing between when people act as individuals and when they act as a crowd, especially "when some occurrence arises that has wide emotional appeal." <b>[The crowd typically has a different dynamic: more hypocognitive, more emotional, more contagious.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4: On how history repeats: one can learn a vast amount about mob psychology by studying past episodes of manias, mob behavior, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: The art of contrary thinking consists in training your mind to ruminate in directions opposite to general public opinions; but weigh your conclusions in the light of current events and current manifestations of human behavior."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: Also a final note in this introduction on <b>using contrary thinking "in order to avoid being entrapped by the propagandists."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>9: "The purpose is to contest the popular view, because popular opinions are so frequently found to be untimely, misled (by propaganda), or plainly wrong."</b> "Too many predictions spoil the forecasts" because counteracting policies are adopted to offset expectations.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9-10: Contrary thinking is a way of thinking but "let's not overweigh it"... It's really just an antidote for failing to think through things carefully; it helps offset human traits of imitation, fear, contagion, habit, credulity, pride of opinion, wishful thinking, etc. Also on idea that <b>a crowd yields to instincts that an individual acting alone would repress</b> and that people instinctively follow the impulses of a herd, they are susceptible to "contagion" in thinking, and also people play "follow the leader." All of these things make people susceptible to suggestion and emotional motivation. <b>Also a very good quote here: "A crowd never reasons."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">11: [The author doesn't phrase it this way but he works through an example here of <a href="https://quickwritingtips.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-meta-read-newspaper.html" target="_blank">meta-reading propaganda or meta-reading a government speech or pronouncement</a>]: On not thinking simply what is <i>in</i> the message (let's call that information layer 1) but asking information layer 2 questions like "why is the message circulated?" "What are the reasons behind it, not just the reasons in it?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section I: It Pays To Be Contrary</b></div><div dir="auto">15: This chapter explains the theory behind "contrary opinion" and explains its usefulness. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">15: "You will have to forgive the author if he makes generous use of the vertical pronoun because much of what follows is personal history." [Vertical pronoun, good one.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16: "I find more and more that it is well to be on the side of the minority, since it is always the more intelligent." --Goethe [In investing, if you can become comfortable with being in the minority, as well as patient, you will do very well.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16ff: The author's experience with Wall Street dating back to the 1920s: his frustration with chart reading, that charts can be used to say anything, or worse, they're "silent" when everyone's in a quandary about what prices will do; he learns [as we all do!] that his own judgment was often "unprofitably faulty"; he does a deep dive into old books on speculation and manias <b>[this is something any student of investing must do: complete a reading list of the key books on the history of manias: I'd suggest starting with <i>Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds</i> by Charles Mackay]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19: The author sums up three lessons that he learned through his mistakes: </div><div dir="auto">1) individual opinions are of little value because they're so frequently wrong </div><div dir="auto">2) human traits like pride of opinion, fear, hope, greed and wishful thinking prevent one from being objective, they make people reach opinionated conclusions </div><div dir="auto">3) he learned the risk of standing on one's opinion, no trait is stronger than defending one's opinion and being unwilling to admit error.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">20: He uncovered the truism that the crowd is usually wrong, and then arrived at the solution to simply go opposite to crowd opinion.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">21: On fighting against your personal viewpoints, on how you may "misjudge public opinion because of your preconceived opinions"; it enables you "to submerge the human traits that are the enemies of clear thinking" [the author doesn't say it this way exactly but somehow you have to detach and lose your egoic attachment to any view you might have about, say, an economic situation or a given political or social issue].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>22: "How do I go about finding what the public opinion is?" [This is similar to trying to understand what the consensus thinking is with a given investment]</b> By reading the news, by consuming media, but also understanding what certain groups want us to accept and believe; see for example the US President's Council of Economic Advisors, or the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, etc., these are basically interest groups that may promulgate a view that they want you to hold ["The banking system is sound" or "A strong dollar is in the interest of the United States" and so on]. <b>[What he's getting at here is how to identify what consensus is by not necessarily asking what the people you know think: there are many, many other indirect ways to learn it; for example, what is it that <i>your government wants you to believe</i>? which often, unfortunately, becomes consensus. Certain "consensus" phrases like "safe and effective" come to mind here.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">24: The author tells an amusing story about how in the years following World War II there was a widely-held expectation of a slump coming and it never came; but it was always just around the corner, but it still never came. And then, "By mid 1955 the idea that 'a slump is just around the corner' had swung full circle to the thought that 'There'll never be another serious slump.'" which was a new idea that <i>yet again</i> could be looked at from a contrarian perspective.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27ff: The author goes through some examples of stock prices in the US and Great Britain before and during World War II to show "interesting examples of how prices reflected future developments months ahead of what was 'logically' feared or expected" [He means here the so-called logical expectations of the consensus, which turned out to be wrong]: See for example the surprise of the New York Stock Exchange going up on the day Hitler marched into Poland; Hitler then "sat out" the winter of 1939-1940, but in May 1940 he invaded Holland and Belgium; everyone thought the market would go up again, but it actually did nothing, which humbled both the consensus and the people who were contrarians. Two weeks later the market declined 45 points when Germany invaded France, everyone woke up to the realization that everyone was wrong about Hitler and the Nazis, then US and British stock prices hit bottom in June of 1940--this also should have been enlightening. Note also the British prices never stopped their advance until 1947(!) even though back in 1940 things looked hopeless for Great Britain. Likewise there was a parallel with US stock markets in that they bottomed with the fall of Corregidor. <b>"Stock prices had a far keener foresight than we, the people!"</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">31ff: Discussion of the 17th century tulipmania in Holland <b>[Note that in recent years the entire tulip mania event has been exposed as a psyop that never actually happened]</b>; reference to John Law's Mississippi Scheme in France and the South Sea Bubble in England in the early 1700s; all examples of crowd psychology and group hysteria.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">34ff: Gustav Le Bon and his book <i>The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind</i> where he explains the behavior and actions of a crowd, how it differs from an individual who is likely to reason and analyze; crowds always act on feeling and emotion <b>and they fellow leaders "or what they assume to be the actions of leaders." [An interesting distinction right there]</b>; Le Bon and his idea of crowd contagion: how public opinion is frequently wrong which is often illustrated in the stock market; on a crowd's susceptibility to suggestion and how suggestions also are contagious; Le Bon writes, "...a crowd, as a rule, is in a state of expectant attention, which renders suggestion easy." Crowds think in images which call up a series of other images. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>38: Good quote from Le Bon's book <i>The Psychology of Socialism</i>: "Now the great power of beliefs, when they tend to assume this religious form... lies in the fact that their propagation is independent of the proportion of truth or error that they may contain, for as soon as belief has gained a lodging in the minds of men its absurdity no longer appears."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38ff: On inflation, which reflects crowd behaviorism and its greed, fear and cupidity; citing different inflationary periods: the fiat money inflation in France of the 18th century and "the false illusion that inflation is prosperity swept through France." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>43ff: On the idea of acting contrary to government statements about inflation or government statements about interest rates: see for example 1950s USA, where the Treasury kept beating the drum for low interest rates, as low as two and a half percent for the 10-year, but rates then went higher [and by the way, inflation was higher than this throughout the entire period: you could argue that the proper play ever since World War II was to trade contrary to Central Bank interest rate policy the whole time!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43ff: Asking the question is the public <i>always</i> wrong? This is the wrong question: the right question is, is the public wrong <i>all the time</i>? Decidedly no, in fact "the public is right more of the time than not... <b>the public is right during the trends but wrong at both <i>ends</i>!"</b> "So, to be cynical, you might say, 'Yes, the public is always wrong when it pays to be right--but it is far from wrong in the meantime.'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45: On how you never get the timing right with the contrary opinion <b>[and therefore to be second-order about it, you must enter into your decisions <i>knowing you won't get the timing right</i>].</b> "It is to be noted that the use of contrary opinions will frequently result in one's being rather too far ahead of events... Therefore, when we adopt a contrary opinion, as a guide, we must recognize that we may be <i>too far</i> ahead of the crowd." <b>[And so you enter your decisions knowing that you're probably early...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46: On the intangibility and the difficulties of using the contrary theory; it's often perplexing and often perverse, it is contrary to one's natural reactions, <b>"...others with whom you discuss your contrary opinions will almost always violently disagree." [Holy cow is that ever the truth: I know this from many many personal experiences, to the point where it's actually a cue to look for: you want to see either aggressive disagreement or complete blank stares from people and then you know you're on to something: your investment idea really might have legs for example.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>48: "...it is far easier to be contrary to general opinions than it is to create original thought." [Again, what a legit cheat code to life!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section II: Essays Pertaining to the Theory of Contrary Opinion and the Art of Contrary Thinking</b></div><div dir="auto">51ff: War as a type of contagion that unifies the herd against a threat; note that a prolonged or intense "war sentiment" is difficult to produce if the war is for defensive reasons: the wave of enthusiasm peters out and the people begin resisting the wartime rules, restrictions and constraints.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54: The author quotes an investment publication, "The average investor does not think--and does not wish to think." The author then predicts that "contrary opinions will remain valid as a guide until public psychology changes--and it has not changed in centuries." Ouch!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55: Reiterating that contrary thinking will often make you early to the theme, and that the crowd is not always wrong but almost always wrong at changes/reversals in market trends. <b>"Your watch is still useful, although it may run fast; you allow for the error and recognize that you may be early for appointments, but you do not miss the train." [Nice quote.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55-57: On using contrary thinking to keep us from bad mental habits or cognitive habits, to keep us out of "rut-thinking" [e.g., allowing our thinking to get into a rut, or be lazy or habitual].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57ff: On the psychology of inflation, referring to Frank Parker Stockbridge and his book <i>Hedging Against Inflation</i>; citing a long tradition in history of canceling debts and reducing the value of currency, and <b>how there's a generalized psychology of inflation that is important to study</b>. Interestingly the author cites the 1930s under Roosevelt, where we went off the gold standard, with "the public went serenely on its way, paying little heed" to the risks of inflation. Thus the correct play here was to fade the crowd and prepare for inflation. Then the author gives an example from the opposite direction a decade and a half later: there was a wide consensus that monetary policy was causing inflation and doubts about the dollar developed. Then, the contrary view again worked: runaway inflation didn't actually happen, there was inflation it never became catastrophic.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60ff: When there is <i>no</i> public opinion; "When everyone ignores a vital subject, it is likely to be important to everybody." <b>[The idea here is meta: you pay attention to the things the crowd is <i>not</i> paying attention to, and--perhaps more important (and more shocking if you think about it)--<i>never</i> pay attention to things the crowd <i>is</i> paying attention to! There are so many ramifications here: you can tune out <i>all</i> the news, ignore all media events since <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-image-guide-to-pseudo-events-in.html" target="_blank">they are almost certainly Daniel Boorstin-type pseudo-events</a>, etc].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>62: Also on the idea of anticipating the public's reaction <i>later</i>: that what is likely to happen is that the public won't pay attention to something, and then really <i>will</i> pay attention to it later, likely after the risk or the event is over or already fully embedded into expectations.</b> Thus you can largely predict the likely behavior and reaction of the public, and act contrary to it before, during and after.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>62ff: On [the lamentably surnamed] Gabriel Tarde's book <i>The Laws of Imitation:</i> talking about how history reveals that it's a fallacy that the majority set the pattern in trends of religious and social and economic life, rather the majority copies or imitates the minority and <i>this</i> is what establishes trends. It's the imitation that's key: you see it in criminal conduct, in development of language, art, law and institutions; [obviously we see it with people aping and imitating behavior they see in movies or on TV; certainly imitation is present in the stock market too].</b> See also this quote that the author shares from Tarde's book: "we do have epidemics of luxury, of gambling, lotteries, of stock speculation, of gigantic railroad undertakings, as well as epidemics of Hegelianism, Darwinism, etc." to which the author adds "today he would doubtless add Communism and Socialism." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">64: From Theodore Burton's book <i>Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and Commercial Depressions</i>, another book the author strongly recommends: Burton cites Clement Juglar, saying that countries that experience the most suffering from economic disturbances tend to show the greatest increase in wealth and material prosperity. <b>[This is interesting to think about, it's sort of like thinking of a country or an economy like a high-volatility stock.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">66ff: On the "gregarious opinion" and the idea of "gregarious man": referring to the herd instinct in humans; <b>man is intolerant and fearful of solitude, either physical or mental</b>; he's also more sensitive to the voice of the herd than any other influence and "he is subject to passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in panics." <b>Likewise he's susceptible to leadership [of the pack], and "his relations with his fellows are dependent on the recognition of him as a member of the herd."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">68ff: Good and sobering quote here from Albert Jay Nock on the universal education system: <b>"if it had done nothing to raise the general level of intelligence, it had succeeded in making our citizenry more easily gullible. It tended powerfully to focus the credulousness of homo sapiens upon the printed word..." and since we were taught to believe what "we read in our school books and what our teachers told us, we bred the habit of 'unthinking acquiescence' rather than exercising such intelligence as we may have."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>70ff: Using contrary thinking to avoid thinking too short-term:</b> different examples here of how events shape policy and decisions rather than the other way around; thus the contrary thinking metaquestion here is: "This [idea/policy/law] may be very well for the short term, but how will it work over the long term?" [This is interesting: it gets you to step out of your reaction to a thing and gets you thinking in terms of second-order consequences.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76ff: On propaganda devices, see Clyde Miller and his book <i>The Process of Persuasion</i>; four simple devices to achieve the acceptance or rejection of ideas or beliefs:</div><div dir="auto">1) the acceptance or virtue device: to cause us to accept by association with good words, symbols, acts</div><div dir="auto">2) the rejection or poison device: to cause us to reject by association with bad words, symbols, acts</div><div dir="auto">3) the testimonial device: accept or reject according to good or bad</div><div dir="auto">4) the together device: using pressure of a group or of mass emotion and action</div><div dir="auto"><b>[Note once again the author makes the case that contrary thinking is valuable in seeing through propaganda]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79: Again on avoiding the trap of using a contrary opinion <i>to defend what you already think.</i> Don't use contrary thinking to support your personal opinions. "Let us adopt a policy of avoiding personal opinions we have to uphold!" <b>[The cheat code here is to train yourself to automatically reject what you "already think."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79: On rendering advice: "I believe it to be a true psychological fact that one cannot be objective and at the same time render advice. You cannot be personal and impersonal at the same time. When one offers advice his mind is naturally focused on 'hoping' to make the advice come right, rather than on the objective and realistic viewpoints that might influence the advices." <b>[Another takeaway here: as you embrace contrary thinking, it not only teaches you to have fewer opinions and make fewer predictions, it causes you to offer less advice. Reminds me quite forcefully of <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-spiritual-teachings-of-ramana.html" target="_blank">Ramana Maharshi's quote "It is best to remain silent."</a>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">82: Asking "what's right" instead of asking "what's wrong" to invert an economic or political question: see for example a conversation where someone is sure to ask "What's wrong with business today, anyway?" and instead to flip it. What's right with the stock market/what's right with the economy, etc, "you will get an entirely fresh slant on things. Your mind will travel in different channels."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">90ff: The author thinks back to the 1884 election between Blaine and Cleveland: during that election cycle Blaine was caught up in a widespread revolt against the sins of the Republican party in those days. The author went through 1884-era issues of the <i>Financial and Commercial Chronicle</i> and saw a hardly any mention of the campaign. 1884 also witnessed a severe but brief stock market panic, note also Ulysses S. Grant's brokerage firm Grant & Ward collapsed that year, thanks to Ward's crookedness.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">92ff: On the US leaving the gold standard during the Civil War and then returning to it in 1879. "There were widespread fears as the resumption date of January 2nd, 1879, drew near. <b>Many expected to see a 'run' on gold, with greenbacks piled counter-high in banks as people demanded gold for their paper dollars. All fears were groundless. Contrary to the expectations of many groups the government actually <i>gained</i> gold on the first day of resumption. When folks still found they could get gold, they didn't want it! Paper was easier to carry in their pockets."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">96ff: On waves of public opinion; see for example during this book's era there was a wave of internationalism which "engulfed public thought in this country"; one should cue oneself to think contrary to these waves; often society is carried away on such "waves" of thought.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">97ff: On when to be contrary, and what intensity of general opinions should we look for [to be contrary to]? How to measure opinions? [Basically here the author is talking about application of the theory.] The author describes a basic usefulness of contrary opinions which is "to guard against predicting the unpredictable" and "avoid being ensnared by faulty general predictions", thus <b>"the theory is more valuable in <i>avoiding</i> errors in forecasting than in employing it for definitive forecasting." [I would add here that it is incredibly difficult to train yourself <i>to not come to conclusions</i> about what's going to happen in the future--this is a really good epistemic exercise, a good exercise of humility to remain in a place of "not knowing" and acting accordingly.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>100: On "the law of the necessity of errors in forecasting"</b> [well phrased!]: the author quotes an article by Albert Hahn about the "forecasting mania of our time": "Until about 1930 serious economists were not so bold--or so naive--as to pretend to be able to calculate the coming of booms and depressions in advance." Note also how "the forecasting mania of our time" assures the usefulness of the contrary opinion of <i>not making forecasts.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">103: On elections and mass opinion: as much as 1/4 to 1/3 of votes can be undecided leading up to an election and this group of people may move as a herd, typically as a result of emotional motivation, not reasoning, thus the undecided mass may move in one composite direction when the election happens. Thus with a movement of this kind either candidate may win by a landslide and thus a general opinion of "there will be a close election" will be wrong.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105ff: [Tangent here on "money minds," people in the tiny minority who are money-makers in any given community. It's not quite clear how this pertains to contrary thinking however.] "Nature has been frugal in dispensing this [money-making] aptitude, but has seen to it that it appears sparingly within groups wherever situated." On money making as a mental characteristic: difficult to acquire, one is typically born with it, if you have this aptitude "it makes little difference whether 'conditions' are rising, falling, or stabilizing [you will still make money/find opportunity]." Many with this aptitude are uneducated, education has nothing to do with it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">107: More on forecasts, <b>and a really good self-referencial heuristic right here: "...the more prominence predictions receive the more inaccurate they are likely to be."</b> Also: "If you believe the predictions, you act against them to protect yourself."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">108ff: On revolutions, how they require a long view; see Gustav Le Bon in his book <i>The Psychology of Revolution</i> where he says <b>"The true revolutions... are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the historians can hardly point to their beginnings."</b> Basically the author shoots down the idea that there would be some sort of revolution in Russia to undo Communism, the system there is now simply well entrenched [which it was in the 1950s when this book was published].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>110ff: Laws of imitation and contagion, again bringing up Gabriel Tarde's book <i>The Laws of Imitation</i>: the importance of paying attention to people's tendency to imitate and the typically involuntary imitation that happens: either we imitate or we anti-imitate [basically we do the opposite, counterimitating, a kind of reactance I guess you could call it].</b> Typically people do not show volition in either of these cases.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">113ff: Interesting notion here about how the early entrepreneurs in the early decades of the USA were so successful that they created these large enterprises <b>that turned into instruments of conformity. Suddenly you're looking at an employee who is being considered for advancement and you're asking "is he a company man?"</b> In other words, is he an individualist or will he conform? Jeez, what a paradox. "As the majority are happier when they conform, there will always be a supply of 'company men.'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">116ff: On looking two ways at once, on thinking contrary to the consensus about, say, the economy, but then automatically thinking about the recovery that would follow a downturn (or vice versa, a slowdown that would follow a boom). Here, thinking contrary helps you think about the inevitable change that will happen, <i>the response to the current trend.</i> Again as always this isn't a prediction and it certainly doesn't have an element of timing, it's just preparing for both of these eventualities, the one trend leading to the other. Thus contrary thinking trains us to recognize that there will be change in the current cycle, leading to the next part of the cycle. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">121ff: Again on how the prevailing conditions produce the collective opinions (not the other way around as everyone seems to think); how "what was happening at the time was looked upon as the cause of events continuing to happen in the same pattern." [In other words, if there's a boom going on, most opinions will also be bullish, and vice versa.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">121ff: Another insight here on government intervention: it is usually caused by a prior condition or maladjustment (like a central bank cuts rates because of a slowdown). "Yet it is often looked upon merely as a current event, the reason for the interference being overlooked or disregarded." Contrary thinking here will get your probe behind the surface events to get at the causes, and will be "a constant reminder you that the present is a forerunner of change."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">124ff: On how events are unpredictable and not knowable, and this confusion gives us an excuse for not thinking. <b>"I, contrarily, believe there is value in bewilderment."</b> Note that the opposite of uncertainty and confusion is dogmatism, and far more errors arise from dogmatism. On the idea that during those times when you're confused and uncertain, you want to put the matter in the back of your mind and let it sort itself out over time. <a href="https://youtu.be/Z8egc3vMN10?si=FRiiSr7v-UXQvAU4" target="_blank">Basically don't "solve" or "resolve" the matter to resolve epistemic discomfort</a>, instead, sit with the "not knowingness."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>132: "When you analyze 'opinions,' to learn how they germinate, you find they commonly sprout from influences outside the mind. Seeds of (cursory) thought are planted by some happening, or propaganda, from which they often blossom into colorful opinions. Thus it is that mass opinions tend to follow, rather than to lead, 'events.'"</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">134: "The crowd is most enthusiastic and optimistic when it should be cautious and prudent; and is most fearful when it should be bold."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>136: Three types of opinions: thoughtful, thoughtless, emotional. On determining under what circumstance the popular views originate, also on distinguishing also between an offhand reply or a thoughtful opinion in response to a question.</b> "Emotional and thoughtless opinions spread widely from imitation and contagion."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">136-7: Very interesting section here on how to cultivate a war spirit in a people: <b>"The government doesn't go around quietly asking people if they wish to go to war. A series of charges against the 'enemy state' is trumped up; cries against the aggressor go fourth, as the propaganda machine gets in motion.</b> An image is fashioned in the people's minds of this dangerous, armed 'imperialist' who is about to take their homes and ruin their existence." <b>[This sure sounds familiar right now doesn't it? Various governments of the west have been doing this with either China or Russia for years now...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">142ff: Applying a Hegelian dialectic to contrary thinking: thesis, antithesis and synthesis: the thesis would be the generally-held opinion, the antithesis would be the contrary or skeptical analysis of that opinion, and <b>the synthesis would be the conclusion that you arrive at which synthesizes the prevailing and the opposing viewpoints.</b> "...the more I learn about the use of contrary thinking, the more I come to the conclusion that I have not always given enough weight to the idea of synthesis." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">146ff: Applying notions of momentum and inertia: in psychology, in economics, etc. Usually in psychological influences the momentum (pushing or influencing someone) has to be subject to increasing intensity or the stimuli may tire or irritate people, or become unfashionable, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">150ff: On "depth manipulators": practitioners of "motivation research" to try to understand our motivations, who skillfully manipulate opinions or get you to buy products, take on beliefs, etc. See Vance Packard's book <i>The Hidden Persuaders</i>. On using contrary thinking to resist this.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">152ff: On mass mesmerism <b>[or as we might call it today mass formation in the language of Matthias Desmet]</b>. Brought about by leaders (Hitler, Robespierre, etc.), or by ideas, like (Keynesian economics, communism, etc.) <b>that are adopted by the crowd through constant affirmation and repetition.</b> "Tell 'em again and again, without explanation or proof, and in time the crowd will believe what you tell 'em." <b>["Two weeks to flatten the curve" or "safe and effective" seem to come to mind here, I can't imagine why...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">156ff: The problem of knowing and measuring the prevailing general opinions: usually you do this by extensive reading and checking of newspapers magazines [today it would be television news and social media] in order to gauge opinion. <b>Also you have to continually ask yourself: is this truly a generalized viewpoint, or is it perhaps a composite of my own views which the mirror misleads me to think are those of the crowd?</b> Also note that people (especially business leaders, major CEOs or politicians) may express an opinion <i>that they wish to be thought of as their beliefs</i>, it doesn't reflect their actual true thoughts. <b>[More thoughts on this: usually among your circle of acquaintances there will be a range of thinkers: some are very consistently consensus thinkers, others are a little ahead, others a little behind. You can actually observe the movement of an opinion across your social circle this way and use it to gauge or estimate prevailing public opinion.]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">160ff: On how the theory of contrary opinion is not a system of forecasting, it is a method of working toward thought- conclusions. <b>A "think stimulator" and a "sedative for over prophesying."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">164: Another application of contrary thinking: investigating subjects or events of which the general public has little or no knowledge: see for example the study of money--people don't think about it at all, they just use money without considering the underlying monetary policies or economics.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">166: Interesting example here of working through a consensus view that "rentable housing is a great inflation hedge" and then working out the contra case, <b>which helps you arrive at all the things that can go wrong.</b> This is a great example of working out the nuances of an investment to help you decide if it's worth doing or not.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>169: On the uses and dangers of extrapolation:</b> extrapolating statistical things like birth rates versus extrapolating crowd activity; <b>also on the fallacy of automatically expecting today's trends to continue.</b> Thus if the consensus view is extrapolatory, if it is "more of the same" then the contrary views would be "better than expected" or "worse than expected" for example. </div><div dir="auto">1) establish the extrapolation</div><div dir="auto">2) consider any conditions which conflict or nullify this trend</div><div dir="auto">3) consider conditions or circumstances that would activate an even stronger trend than the consensus view</div><div dir="auto">[I think if this like what would be the base case, bull case and bear case, and what might be the various drivers of each case? <b>Note also, and note that the author also says this elsewhere in the book: that sometimes the crowd is right (thus "more of the same" is also often what happens), just remember that the crowd is usually really wrong at inflection points.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">176: The money-minded person who is well balanced thinks out money angles, probabilities for loss as well as profits, considers the risks, etc. Also such a person employs contrary opinions to guard against impetuous action. <b>[Yep: <a href="https://youtu.be/dbqfcaJAteE?si=UiyTQ4HgQqzUM-yg" target="_blank">you want to install mental subroutines to avoid FOMO for example!</a>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">177ff: Conflicts, geopolitics, war applications of contrary thinking: a discussion here on how the Soviets handled the West/East relationship; this is an example of using contrary thinking as well, working out probable steps the West would likely take and then figuring out as many responses and procedures as they can; also in war where a good battle tactics involve general conceptual frameworks like "don't be where the enemy expects you" and "be where the enemy doesn't expect you" and "do the unexpected," etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182ff: Contrary thinking as a mechanism to practice association of ideas, moving from idea to idea in a chain reaction which is part of the art of creativity, concentrating and observing counter angles on news, on commentaries, on all the predictions that bombard us, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>183: "...others will often disagree (sometimes violently!) with your contrary viewpoints." [See the note for page 42 above as well. Over the years I've discovered that with investing and with specific investments the more rattled or angry or emotionally incontinent your view makes other people, the more potential it has...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">184ff: Interesting snippet here on focusing on words: in order to observe the workings of propaganda for example; also note that all opinions are expressed in words, they may have nothing to do with facts or they may mislead or distort facts, so <i>being contrary to the words used</i> can be extremely helpful. See for example company management reporting poor profits (which is a fact) but quickly pointing out all the conditions that forced those "poor profits" on them--that management isn't at fault, that some external factor is responsible, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">188: On detecting techniques of writing about business, finance or other topics as an indicator for both consensus thought and as a trigger for contrary thinking, and protection against brainwashing. <b>"...adopt the plan of mentally checking everything we read."</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Epilogue: Slaves to "They" by Samuel B. Pettengill</b></div><div dir="auto">[This author was a former member of Congress in the 1930s who helped vote down FDR's "Court packing" plan, he's also a fellow Vermont resident with the author. The essay is cantankerous and forgettable, to put it diplomatically]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193: "The old time editors, country lawyers and David Harums have been laid away and their places taken by merged newspapers and centrally controlled nationwide television and radio chains." [Interesting to see this from the 1950s...]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Garfield A. Drew: <i>New Methods for Profit in the Stock Market</i></div><div dir="auto">Humphrey B. Neill: <i>Tape Reading and Market Tactics</i> (1931)<br /></div><div dir="auto">Alexander Dana Noyes: <i>The Marketplace--Reminiscences of a Financial Editor</i></div><div dir="auto">Gustave Le Bon: <i>The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind</i></div><div dir="auto">Gustave Le Bon: <i>The Psychology of Socialism</i> </div><div dir="auto">Robert L. Smitley: <i>Popular Financial Delusions</i></div><div dir="auto">***Wilfred Trotter: <i>Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War</i></div><div dir="auto">Everett Dean Martin: <i>The Behavior of Crowds</i></div><div dir="auto">William Henry Mikesell: <i>Mental Hygiene</i></div><div dir="auto">***Frank Parker Stockbridge: <i>Hedging Against Inflation</i></div><div dir="auto">***Gabriel Tarde: <i>The Laws of Imitation</i></div><div dir="auto">Theodore E. Burton: <i>Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and Commercial Depressions</i> (1902)</div><div dir="auto">Carl Snyder: <i>Capitalism the Creator</i></div><div dir="auto">Clyde R. Miller: <i>The Process of Persuasion</i></div><div dir="auto">Harry Elmer, ed: <i>Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace</i></div><div dir="auto">George Katona: <i>Psychological Analysis of Economic Behavior</i></div><div dir="auto">Francis Delaisi: <i>Political Myths and Economic Realities, 1927</i></div><div dir="auto">Ferdinand Zweig: <i>Economic Ideas: A Study of Historical Perspectives</i></div><div dir="auto">Herbert Spencer: <i>Man Versus the State</i></div><div dir="auto">Robert P. Crawford: <i>Think for Yourself</i></div><div dir="auto">Abram Lipsky: <i>Man the Puppet: The Art of Controlling Minds</i></div><div dir="auto">Vance Packard: <i>The Hidden Persuaders</i></div><div dir="auto">Stuart Chase: <i>Guides to Straight Thinking</i></div><div dir="auto">Edith Hamilton: <i>The Greek Way</i></div><div dir="auto">Edith Hamilton: <i>The Roman Way</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-57294029886552490852024-03-08T06:48:00.000-08:002024-03-08T17:18:23.995-08:00End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">If you pick up <i>End Times</i> at all, I recommend reading only Chapter 7: State Breakdown, which walks through several interesting historical examples of state collapse, including Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and Ukraine.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">Otherwise, with its clickbait title, lack of focus, noticeable errors, and even a certain amount of copypasta from his prior work, readers may get a sinking feeling that author Peter Turchin sausaged out <i>End Times</i> to meet a marketing deadline. This book was much, much weaker than his <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/03/war-and-peace-and-war-rise-and-fall-of.html" target="_blank">earlier <i>War and Peace and War</i></a>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It can be revealing to read a book's acknowledgments for clues about the author's struggles writing it. Here we learn that after feedback from an early reader, Turchin "extensively restructured and streamlined the storyline." Unfortunately, <i>End Times</i> remains poorly structured, certain chapters remain badly unfocused, and the book could have used yet another restructuring and streamlining before publication. Most importantly, Turchin <i>certainly</i> should have completely rethought his idea of using imaginary characters and imaginary dialogue to illustrate aspects of his sociological frameworks. Chapters 3 and 4 contain various made-up people (a proletarian Trump-supporter, a 1%-er, other elites of various types, and so on), and Chapter 5 contains an imaginary dialogue between two imaginary "ruling class" members who come off so implausibly that the reader wonders if the author has any idea at all how this class thinks and operates.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">In a book on therapy, an author would be <i>expected</i> to make up "composite" characters to protect patient privacy. That is one instance, at least, where it would be reasonable to use made-up characters, although the reader still must trust the author to render them accurately and ethically, not just make them up out of whole cloth to "prove" a therapeutic method. However, in a book on sociology, which this author prefers to call "real science" (see the next two paragraphs), this is quite possibly the <i>worst</i> way to bolster any argument--or your field's "scientific" reputation for that matter. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">We could even go so far as to call this the "argument by imaginary friend" fallacy! All the imaginary friend segments of the book should have been cut.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">In its last few chapters and in the appendices <i>End Times</i> entirely loses focus as the author subjects his readers to an extended defense of cliodynamics, his subject domain. Here I want to briefly address the author's repeated insistence across the last third of the book that sociology, and specifically cliodynamics-based sociology, is "real science."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This reminds me of a story one of my oldest friends told me about his first day at college. He and the other entering freshmen were in the university auditorium for a welcome session, and when the chief of public safety got up to speak, the first thing he said was <i>"we are a real police force."</i> Laughter tittered across the auditorium. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The moral is this: if it's actually true you don't have to say it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes: </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface:</b></div><div dir="auto">ixff: The author attempts to persuade the reader that there is such a thing as the science of history. He begins his career as an ecologist, has to learn mathematics to study complexity science and then applies complexity science to human societies; he argues that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and even predictable waves of instability brought about by similar forces.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xi: Metrics used in his model: stagnating or declining real wages, growing inequality, overproduction of educated elites, declining public trust, exploding public debt; noting also that all these things are "related to each other dynamically."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part I: The Cliodynamics of Power</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Elites, Elite Overproduction, and the Road to Crisis</b></div><div dir="auto">3ff: Who are the elites? The author thinks of the various ranks of power holders: economic wealth, bureaucratic wealth/administrative wealth, also ideological power (like public intellectuals who may shape policy). </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">7ff: Understanding "social reproduction of the elites" in order to understand <b>"elite overproduction"</b>; on established elites versus elite aspirants; on the rapid growth of the super-rich since the 1980s: decamillionaires ($10 million in wealth or higher) increased tenfold to 693,000 people from 1983-2019; this compares to 53% growth in households; thus decamillionaires swelled from 8 basis points (0.08%) to 54 basis points (0.54%) of the population. [The author considers this "bad" but I wonder if it really is good or bad]; "When the social pyramid becomes top-heavy, this has dire consequences for the stability of our societies."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9ff: Elite overproduction leading to wider and wider rulebreaking behavior.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11ff: Leading to "popular immiseration"; the author describes the elites acting as a <b>"wealth pump"</b> of resources from everyone else to them; parallel narratives of both Trump and Lincoln, outsiders put into power during times of instability. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>20: The author is a little bit fast and loose with his tour of pre-Civil War North-South dynamics: for example it is not true, in fact not even <i>close</i> to true, that most southerners owned slaves as he asserts on page 20. [Admittedly, this number can be looked at in different ways but in terms of total population in slave states approximately 5% owned slaves, and if you look at it in terms of households (in other words you count the total number of people living in a household that <i>happens</i> to own a slave but yet you count <i>each of the household members separately</i> as slaveowners) it is still well less than 20%. This is a bit of a basic, and quite honestly a lazy, error.] [Note also this quote: "the South seceded, triggering the American Civil War" which is an interesting way to put it. In reality the American Civil War was "triggered" when the North violently invaded the South, using a constructed incident at Fort Sumter as a causus belli.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">21ff An overproduction of elites in China during the late part of the Qing dynasty and the collapse from 1820 through to the 20th century; the mandarin system; <b>the strange story of Hong Xiuquan (1814-1864), frustrated licentiate who started a religion, ultimately fomenting the Taiping Rebellion, a tremendously bloody civil war.</b> Hong gathered half a million immiserated followers, even setting up a semi-state of his own before being reconquered 11 years later. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Stepping Back: Lessons of History</b></div><div dir="auto">29: Discussion of integrative-disintegrative cycles, roughly a century long; iterations in this cycle due to the father-and-son cycles that happen within; this is a review of the wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels idea from <i>War and Peace and War</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">31ff: The author will now apply his model to medieval France, and to the various waves of instability in France and Western Europe. [This again will be repeat material to readers of <i>War and Peace and War</i>]; France peaking in 1300, a population boom, then famines and then the plague, all in the 14th century, cutting France's population in half, to 10 million, by 1400). Also across the 13th century there was elite overproduction again, acting as a wealth pump, enriching landowners at peasant expense; inflation and state insolvency; breakdown in the state and general order by 1350 with Jacquerie peasant rebellions, the urban uprising in Paris of Etienne Marcel, etc; not until 1453 did France evict the English, reunify, and get back on its feet, followed by a century-long integrative phase.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38ff: Now onto England for a second example: England's disintegrative phase was delayed as so many English elites found war in France to be tremendously lucrative, so elites were essentially "exported"; when evicted by the French in 1380, England's tailspin began, massive brutality, disorder, Richard II deposed in 1399; then another integrative cycle with Henry V, but then followed by more disorder; the War of the Roses which was incredibly brutal; the author says elites at all levels declined "severalfold" during England's Late Medieval Crisis [measured indirectly by imports of wine from Gascony, which fell fourfold during this period].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43: The author teases us here with why England didn't have a state breakdown in 1830; to be discussed in Chapter 9.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44ff: Elites in Islam and steppe societies where polygamy was practiced: driving much faster elite overproduction and thus shorter integrative phases in these societies. Referring [again, just as he did in <i>War and Peace and War</i>] to 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun who noted this too. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46: On dynamic entrainment as a force pulling countries into sync with each other; if you put several metronomes on the same board and start them swinging out of sync, eventually they will swing in synchrony; there may be external forces affecting many countries at the same time, causing correlated societal collapse. <b>[Is this a real reason, like a scientific reason, or is it like a made-up "I need an epicycle here to make my model fit better" kind of reason?]</b>; also "direct contagion" as another synchronizing force, see the Antonine plague in Rome or the spread of the Black Plague through Eurasia which drove the Late Medieval Crisis in many regions. See also cholera pandemics during the Age of Revolutions in the mid-19th century; societies reach an epidemiological threshold thanks to population growth, density, lack of nutrition, economic immiseration, etc.; typically epidemics or contagions undermine social order because the social pyramid becomes top heavy; whatever the reason, they tend to tip societies into crisis. Note also a contagion doesn't have to be an epidemic: it can also be an idea like the Arab Spring <b>[or even Islam itself, although the author doesn't use this as an example]</b>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part III: The Drivers of Instability</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: "The Peasants are Revolting"</b></div><div dir="auto">55ff: This chapter begins with a made-up dialog/portrait of a Trump supporter. We learn the term "precariat" (an economically precarious proletarian); the author includes all the expected stereotypes of our Trump supporter character, he checks all the boxes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60ff: Now a portrait of a liberal 1%-er from Washington DC; This sounds equally unrealistic..."life has never been better"; </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>60ff: I have to take a moment to note that Turchin appears to be oblivious to the so-called "Pinker problem" as memorably explained by Nassim Taleb: while Steven Pinker argues that "the world is getting safer," this is <i>only</i> true if you ignore the world wars and various genocides of the 20th century! Essentially this is equivalent to kicking all the gigantic outliers out of your dataset, and then claiming that what's left still describes reality.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60ff: Data on median household income, which increased from $52,000 to $63,000 from 1976 to 2016, up 21%, note here that the median real wage increase from $17.11 to $18.90 over that same time, just 10%; <b>[<a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/j-is-for-junk-economics-by-michael.html" target="_blank">Michael Hudson here would comment that people's "monthly nut" and the "rake" they have to pay to the financialized layer of the economy</a> has likely more than doubled over that time, perhaps possibly tripled, thus the median household is getting squeezed on the income side, but getting squeezed way harder on the expense side. Note also this stuff also affects wealthy elites too: if you live in a major city you really need to be in the 1%, not the top 10%, for this not to affect you.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>65: Discussion of inflation statistics and various incentives that a government has to understate inflation: one of the largest would be that it inflates real GDP per capita, Until recently I never really thought about the implications of this, this is a huge, huge political incentive.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">66: The author talks about the increasing cost of college, both in nominal dollars, inflation-adjusted dollars and in labor hours terms. The cost is astronomically higher, the author views this as "the cost to move up in the system," and correctly so. [Furthermore you could add in a separate problem which is our system is producing semi-elites beyond its needs, a sort of semi-elite or credentialed class overproduction problem!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">67ff: On biological, social and health well-being. <b>The author discusses declining height metrics since the 1960s as evidence of declines here. [I would argue that the author makes a possibly major oversight here by not mentioning immigration trends which accelerated radically in 1965 and thereafter, this almost certainly would skew the numbers]</b>; also on life expectancy declines.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>70ff: The credentialed class [college-educated or advanced educated classes] is allegedly doing much better, according to the author [I would argue this is not true either: Their wages have stagnated, they get blown out of their careers at precisely the wrong time, the academic world is filled with precariously positioned adjunct professors, etc]</b>; also discussion here of "deaths of despair" across demographics; [you can really see how our civilization has become fully atomized; we have a misdirected and undirected populace that's being chewed at from all sides.]; Note also that the author initially thought we had achieved a post-Malthusian world, but when he comes into contact with the work of Case and Deaton (see Anne Case and Angus Deaton: <i>Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism</i>), he learns he was wrong.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">73ff: Idealization here from the author about Roosevelt's New Deal and the alleged social contract that emerged between the state, elites and the commoners: he thinks in the 1970s a new generation of elites replaced the "great civic generation" of elites from before, and these new "mean elites" began dismantling the social contract; the author sites supply and demand imbalances with labor, bringing women into the workforce, greatly increasing immigration and the movement of production overseas, all of which squeeze wages. [Very strange also here that the author uses a statistical aggregate analysis of the real minimum wage when it is largely set by fiat on a state by state basis, and furthermore the economics of minimum wage work varies dramatically with the economics of the specific region of the USA.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77: On "subjective well-being" studies.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>79ff: Discussion of the "wealth pump":</b> this is the argument that as the elites grow in numbers they pump more wealth away from everyone else into their pockets. <b>[This is an interesting idea that will clearly resonate with people, but I wonder to what extent the author grasps how wealth works as you derive it increasingly from investments and as you move away from W-2 salary income: beyond a certain point your asset inflation/capital gains component is what really moves the needle, the income becomes increasingly less important and even arbitrary, as you have more and more ability to dictate your income (or not have any income at all!) based on the types of investments you make or what assets you might sell (producing either gains or losses) in a given year. This is a perception error you sometimes see from W-2 salaried academics.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">81ff: "The peasants are revolting" as a pun: it indicates the disdain upper classes feel towards lower classes; also "the rich are perhaps even more vulnerable than common people" during periods of social and political turbulence.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: The Revolutionary Troops</b></div><div dir="auto">[This chapter is low value]</div><div dir="auto">83ff: Here we have a made-up story about Jane, a privileged child of an affluent Manhattan family, who went to exclusive private schools, then went to Columbia University; she signs up for a language school in Guatemala and experiences the all-too-common gringa irony of living with a host family that is far happier than hers despite their poverty; her Guatemala experience radicalizes her and she starts joining radical student groups, then joins the occupy Wall Street movement, and then joins ANTIFA, and <i>then</i> becomes an anarchist ("she thinks that classical Marxism is now somewhat outdated. She doesn't feel much solidarity with the working classes. Too many of them are racists and homophobes.") etc., etc., and then... She ends up at Yale Law School, but claims "I am not going to become a corporate lawyer, however." <b>[This whole life arc sounds like parody, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law" target="_blank">like an example of Poe's Law</a>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">85ff: [Although for whatever it's worth, it's a striking irony to read the author's description here of police brutality, when just a couple days ago, while putting the finishing touches on my review of Turchin's prior book <i>War and Peace and War</i>, I read through discussions of peasant control mechanisms used in 14th and 15th century France that involved essentially killing off most of the peasants. Note that during the police "brutality" described by this author at Occupy protests, there was just one victim with a skull fracture, and no deaths, despite police suppression of protests all over the US. Quite striking to note the contrast.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">90ff: on "elite precariats" or "the frustrated aspirant class" </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>91-2: [Interesting discussion here on changes in law school compensation, the author uses this to try and illustrate a maldistribution of rewards going to "aspirant class" people; but I wonder if the author ever thought about what actually goes into the <i>production</i> of these starting salary numbers, how much number massaging and GIGO go into manufacturing "law school starting salary" statistics. If the author is credulous about this, how credulous might he be with other GIGO-related numbers that he's analyzing...?]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">93ff: More on the results of elite overproduction: an increase in cheating, terror of being left behind, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">95ff: The fragmentation of the ideological landscape [here the author could have tied the book into his concept of asabiya from <i>War and Peace and War</i>]; in the USA, both the left and right are fragmenting; various pre-1970s "norms" breaking down dramatically (the list of norms the author chooses here includes "tattoos and piercings frowned on"); breakdown of the post WWII consensus.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105: On Vera Zasulich, anarchist and later Marxist, who shot and wounded the Governor of St. Petersburg and was acquitted at trial.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: The Ruling Class</b></div><div dir="auto">[This is also a scattered chapter, talking about the USA's elites, a tangent on military elites, back to the USA, etc.]</div><div dir="auto">109ff: Another imaginary "ruling class" couple, Clara and Andy: these characters are not believable or plausible on several levels, indicating the author doesn't understand how people in this class actually think.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>113: "...if you can persuade the people to do what you want, you will not have to pay them or force them to do it."</b> On controlling ideological power, via priesthood/religion, via economic or land power, via bureaucracy, via the modern state, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">114: The Mamluks under Saladin in Crusade-era Palestine and Egypt; a military dictatorship but one that avoided elite overproduction by forbidding sons to inherit their fathers' positions. The author believes the 2011 "Arab Spring" in Egypt resulted from elite overproduction there. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>120: [The author may be making a very basic error here in his understanding of the repudiation of all war debts of the Confederacy after the American Civil War: he argues that this wiped out the wealth of the South, but on the contrary, it was literally a debt jubilee imposed by the North, where the South repudiated debts which were mostly payable to European borrowers. This is a debt jubilee, it's not "wiping out the wealth of the South. This is an elimination of a liability and thus it would make the South not less wealthy but <i>wealthier</i>, certainly it wouldn't wipe out Southern wealth.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">120ff: Extremely broad brush summary of the post Civil War elite, bouncing from odd factoids about the number of millionaires from 1860 to 1870; the railroad industry which was a dominant political economic force; the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th amendment; the homestead act; the Gilded Age social register; and then leaping forward to post-1920s policy planning; nonprofit organizations; with half a paragraph on each of these topics one after the other, the reader struggles to see a central thread here.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">124ff: American plutocracy today: the author considers "owners and managers of large income-producing assets such as corporations, banks and law firms" to be "at the top of the power pyramid in America." The author is very quick to argue that saying "America is a plutocracy is, to be clear, not a conspiracy theory. It's a scientific theory."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">124: Interesting blurb here on <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell_effect" target="_blank">Martha Mitchell, an early whistleblower who tried to expose Watergate</a>, who was branded mentally ill for her claims. This will send you down a rabbit hole. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>129-130: [The author makes a basic and common error with his discussion of the estate tax; he fails to understand that while an estate tax might only affect the super rich, that money still flows through the government via the Cantillon effect, <i>and thus it flows right back to the elites, thus re-enriching the rich all over again.</i> It's a strange delusion that well-meaning inheritance tax fans have here: that they think somehow that money will be magically redistributed to the rest of us. Turchin should be aware of this; in fact later, on page 236, Turchin will explain the "Iron Law of Oligarchy," which says basically </b><b>when an interest group acquires a lot of power it starts using this power in self-interested ways. It's interesting that the author can't seem to see this exact problem with estate tax/Cantillon effects. A powerful elite will likewise use it in self-interested ways!</b><b>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>132-3: Note also the footnote here on page 133 in a discussion of immigration, which takes the reader to a <i>massive</i> wall of text debating the question "Does immigration depress wages?"--something that should be blindingly self-evident to even the most innumerate economist. Fortunately the author realizes it: </b>"My statistical analysis of long-term data trends indicates that immigration has been a significant contributor to the stagnation/decline of wages in the United States over the past several decades."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">134: Note also the language used in the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration: "the development of a surplus labor force"... This was before they figured out the post-modernist technique of naming a bill for the exact opposite of what it does. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Why Is America a Plutocracy?</b></div><div dir="auto">137ff: The first three pages of this chapter should have been a sentence or two. Claiming the USA inherited its plutocracy via English aristocrats grafted onto land here. Actually the more I think about it: this chapter should have been combined with the prior chapter (there's a lot of repetition here), and the author should have also cut out Chapter 5's "imaginary friend" section too. This would have reduced these two chapters down to one short, tight chapter.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">149-150: About the only really useful insight in this chapter is right here openly stating that the immigration reduction laws of 1921 and 1924 had a broad effect of reducing labor oversupply, thus they helped limit inequality significantly in the coming decades. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>153: [The author makes a basic, <i>basic</i> error here confusing wealth with income in his discussion of top marginal tax brackets (he presumes the high top tax brackets of the 20th century worked to level inequality). Note: anyone who wants to maintain a stable plutocracy would <i>always</i> want the highest possible marginal tax brackets. Why? <i>Because it prevents the production of new rich</i>. Once you have serious wealth--thus your annual income doesn't move the needle with your wealth--you don't care about taxes at all.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>154ff: Disappointing also that there's absolutely no discussion of inflation as a factor that increases the relative wealth of the richest, because they already own assets!</b> Think of it like a sort of "speeding up of the treadmill of life" for all people who are still trading their labor value for money. <b>When people are stuck in the fiat money trap getting paid in "melting ice cubes" and haven't yet saved up any asset-based capital that could give them a shot at keeping up with inflation, they are basically held down by the mechanism of inflation itself. This whole idea seems to be lost on the author. In fact there's no mention of inflation, <i>not one use of the word</i>, in these entire two chapters of plutocracy! A whiff. Inflation plus high marginal income tax rates are perhaps the two most important elements of maintaining a plutocracy.] </b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part III: Crisis and Aftermath</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: State Breakdown</b></div><div dir="auto">[With this chapter the quality of the book takes a step higher: this chapter is more coherent, more readable, better written, the author has a better bead on what he's trying to do here.]</div><div dir="auto">161ff: Starting with the story of Nero in AD 68, waking up alone as all of his guards and servants fled. "States die in a great variety of ways. Some go out in a bang of violence; others unravel quietly and die with a whimper." On how in general people "severely overestimate the power of rulers," it's both lazy language and bad sociology.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">163: Wild blurb here on Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan right before it collapsed to the Taliban in 2021. Ghani used to be an academic studying state collapse, and he even co-wrote a book on the subject, <i>Fixing Failed States</i>. (!!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">164ff: Stalin as "perhaps the most successful dictator of the twentieth century"; he appointed loyalists to key positions, and then appointed another layer of loyalists to watch the first group, then repressed key subordinates and replaced them with ambitious underlings; <i>he literally took care of elite surplus in Russia by exterminating them.</i> "...he was a master of building and maintaining a power network, with himself at its center."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">166: on "Clio-Freudianism", the author calls it a pseudoscience "which uses Freud's psychoanalysis to understand the emotional origins of the behavior of leaders." Also a discussion of "great man" versus sociological analysis of history, which is rehashed from <i>War and Peace and War</i>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">168ff: "The best predictor of whether a country will be experiencing a violent internal conflict next year is whether it is already in conflict this year." [On one level you have to laugh at the circularity of this but his point here is that civil wars tend to drag on a long time, but their onset is extremely difficult to predict]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">175ff: Moving on to a discussion of the Soviet Union post breakup, which "was really a giant corporation in which the state owned the wealth producing assets" that were rapidly privatized in a corrupt and violent process after the breakup; see the joke between two Russian oligarchs, Berezovsky and Guzinsky: "Why did you put a contract on me? No, it was you who put a contract on me!" They had both hired assassins to eliminate the other; discussion of how the oligarchs made a deal with Yeltsin: in return for guaranteeing privatization of state enterprises, they would finance his campaign and use their media resources (which they controlled) to help him. Also they brought in American campaign consultants to manage and basically steal Yeltsin's re-election. "Russia became an extreme plutocracy in 1996." Also on the 1998 financial crisis in Russia, when the ruble was devalued, plus the state defaulted on its sovereign debt. What followed then was two power networks formed: the ruling faction was the oligarchs plus the mass media under their control; the second group was the administrative and military elites, who won out under Vladimir Putin. It was a gradual revolution where oligarchs were exiled or imprisoned, also note that the oligarchs didn't control the "coercive state apparatus" and were "heartily disliked by the population." The author goes on to argue that "The new ruling class in Russia turned out to be quite corrupt and nepotistic. Its members enriched themselves enormously by stripping wealth-producing assets from the oligarchs and by diverting a large proportion of state expenditures into their own pockets."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">178: The author argues "in Belarus the oligarchs never gained power" and "the state retained ownership of major industrial corporations and prevented the rise of oligarchs."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">179ff: Ukraine as a plutocracy which paralleled Russia in the 1990s; but they also did not form a cohesive ruling class; also noting that Ukraine is "particularly vulnerable to external pressures" as it sits on the fault line between NATO and Russia.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>181: [A really interesting footnote here talking about how the USA and its NATO lapdogs had the power to freeze assets of various billionaires in Ukraine and Russia (and obviously they did just that in 2022 to Russian oligarchs); you can't help but think that we actually did Putin's bidding in Ukraine by further weakening the oligarchy class in the favor of the bureaucratic/military class there! Also the footnote cites a Russian oligarch in the UK who was limited via sanctions to GBP2,500 a month in spending, lamenting "I don't know how to live. I don't know. I really don't know."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182ff: Discussion here of direct power exercises by the US government over many Ukrainian plutocrats, see for example how the US put in place legal proceedings to extradite Dmytro Firtash, who was an [likely very pro-Russian and Russified] oligarch from Donetsk; also American "proconsuls" [this is the author's word here] including diplomat Victoria Nuland using Department of State money to exert influence over the Ukrainian ruling class <b>[very interesting and disturbing how it seems so easy for the USA to mess up the coherency of an entire country and then install a puppet regime in power.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">185: Discussion here of the election of Vikyor Yanukovych in Ukraine, who came to power in 2010, he jailed his predecessor Yulia Timoshenko; following the arc of his regime and how his power support structures deserted him after the Maiden Square protests in Kiev, this was his "Nero moment" where his support melted away; he ran away to Southern Russia where he now lives in exile. <b>The author cynically says "The people had triumphed, and democracy was restored. At least, this is how the Euromaidan Revolution was portrayed in the corporate media. In reality, the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution was no more a people's revolution than any other revolution in history. It was driven by the same forces that we have discussed in the pages of this book--popular immiseration and elite overproduction. The people didn't gain as a result of this revolution. Ukrainian politics continued to be as corrupt as before."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186: "The most catastrophic consequence of the 2014 Revolution was a bitter civil war in the two Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the Donbass militia, aided by Russia, battled against the Ukrainian military and openly neo-Nazi volunteer brigades, such as the Azov Regiment." <b>[I'm surprised this paragraph made it through editing, as it contains clear samizdat information about the widely denied existence of neo-nazis in this region, see photo below]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAnDSCAAreQGMS70CrEH_bf58dTdIl7-cVHFepRT_D8SBi7ELWzetdEW0rGzwpucOOWVX3OeXNhDlgEreGJNfJD4-TvqPqYzbgsGrcjLkBYFTrR_ywgwaTSNKB3CnEtagk8ceSfQHmxwywONI3mGKzLAMRrZmwP-3LMLjyxnQrux4FRPXftrOt6vr1JVo/s4039/IMG_20240219_112852810.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="4039" height="105" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUAnDSCAAreQGMS70CrEH_bf58dTdIl7-cVHFepRT_D8SBi7ELWzetdEW0rGzwpucOOWVX3OeXNhDlgEreGJNfJD4-TvqPqYzbgsGrcjLkBYFTrR_ywgwaTSNKB3CnEtagk8ceSfQHmxwywONI3mGKzLAMRrZmwP-3LMLjyxnQrux4FRPXftrOt6vr1JVo/w400-h105/IMG_20240219_112852810.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186: Zelensky put in place as a result of a rivalry between two oligarchs, Poroshenko and Kolomoiski, who needed a candidate to oppose Poroshenko.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">187ff: Discussion here of pseudo-democracies, states with the trappings of democracy but not run for the benefit of the population; also a discussion of the differences between Ukraine and Belarus: on the 2014 uprising that was "successful" in Ukraine and the 2021 uprising in Belarus that wasn't; where Belarus had a cohesive administrative-military elite that weathered the protests without problem whereas Ukraine had economic elites who hated each other and plotted against each other; also the author argues that Ukraine had a wealth pump that overproduced oligarchs, whereas Belarus had no wealth pump and no intra-elite conflicts. <b>[What's most disturbing here in the case of Ukraine is to see how they're losing all their military age men in the conflict with Russia--a conflict that appears only designed to keep the current oligarchy in power, while NATO indirectly "fights Russia to Ukraine's last man." It's just gross and offensive on every level.]</b> The author later concludes that "America is no Ukraine. The American ruling class is unified and organized by a set of overlapping institutions" discussed in Chapter 5. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">189: The next chapter covers the possible trajectories the United States might follow in the coming decades.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Histories of the Near Future</b></div><div dir="auto">[Another unfocused chapter that's all over the place; the author starts talking about his sociological model, but then ends the chapter talking about Tucker Carlson and JD Vance.] </div><div dir="auto">191ff: "Now that America is in crisis, we want to know what could happen next." [This chapter quickly becomes frustrating as the author spends page after page going over aspects of his "model" only to say that his model's predictions "should be taken with some degree of skepticism" and "the goal is not to predict the future but to use the model to understand how possible actions may shape different futures."]; The author wants to use formal mathematical models to make predictions; he and his colleagues have been trying to work on an approach called multi-path forecasting; the heart of his MPF model is the "wealth pump"; he tracks factors like labor supply, immigration, job supply, [basically this sounds like economic forecasting (with all of its lack of rigor) combined with making historical predictions (which is sociology's unique brand of "science")], note that there are more discussions of his approach in Appendix 3.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">194: An almost staggeringly specious assumption by the author right here: "When worker wages increase faster than GDP per capita (that is, when relative wages grow), the creation of new superrich is choked off. Some exceptional individuals continue to create new fortunes, but their numbers are few. The old wealth, meanwhile, is slowly dissipated as a result of bankruptcy, inflation, and the division of property among multiple heirs. Under such conditions, the size of the super wealthy class gradually shrinks." [You could only say this if you had no idea how to build wealth, and how wealthy families are very much capable of building wealth during periods just like the author describes. If these are the types of assumptions upon which this author builds his MPF model, we're going to have a problem predicting anything...]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195ff: A lot of "on the one hand/on the other hand"-type language in here: if there are a lot of radicals in a population, this happens; if not, then this happens; and so on. By the way, this is another variable that his MPF model tracks: the number of radicals proportionate to the total population. "The model keeps track of three kinds of individuals": naive individuals who become radicalized if exposed to the virus of radicalism, actual radicals and moderates. [Wait, he left out "glowie-inspired radicals"!] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">199ff: Another module of his MPF engine is the "social contagion module" and his "political stress index" combining the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction; he measures popular immiseration by inverse relative income, or median income divided by GDP per capita <b>[holy cow this sure looks like a datamined model if I ever saw one].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">206ff: The remainder of this chapter seems to be all over the place: talking about corporate elites not being willing to contribute to the common good like they used to; talking about obstructionist networks of wealthy ultraconservatives; the author appears unaware of the political capture of the Southern Poverty Law Center organization; a sidebar on the guy that supposedly plotted to capture Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; he considers senator Elizabeth Warren to be a dissident (??) when she is clearly the opposite, advocating for the tradfi banking system; interestingly he seems to be <i>almost</i> a Trump fan (at least he was idealistic about him as a counter-elite until his presidency happened), and he's even complimentary of Steve Bannon, who he considers a genuine anti-elite; later quoting extensively from Tucker Carlson's 2018 book, etc; a strange sidebar on JD Vance and the fact that he was encouraged by his professor at Yale Law School to write a memoir which became <i>Hillbilly Elegy,</i> etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">215: The author describes the 2020 election as "The Establishment ran a 'counterinsurgency campaign' which succeeded in removing this irritant [Trump] from the body politic."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">215ff: Tucker Carlson "is interesting because he is the most outspoken anti-establishment critic operating within the corporate media." Also the <i>New York Times</i> poring over transcripts of all 1,150 episodes of the show over six years and describing it as "the most racist show in the history of cable news."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">220: Weird, out-of-place discussion of J.D. Vance as a potential elite figure. <b>[A reader should be totally forgiven here for mistakenly thinking this chapter was about his MPF model and predicting which way the USA was going to go.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">222: The author concludes that United States is in a revolutionary situation, and for the ruling class there are two routes out of it: one is overthrow, the other is to adopt reforms that re-balance the system and reverse the trends of popular immiseration and elite overproduction. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: The Wealth Pump and the Future of Democracy</b></div><div dir="auto">223: The author and his team have collected data on 100 historical breakdown/reform-type periods and finds a wide range of paths of widely different severity.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">224ff: The author focuses on the last complete wave of state breakdowns: the Age of Revolution between 1830 and 1870, "a turbulent period in world history" when "nearly all major states experienced revolutions or civil wars (or both)." He covers the two examples where the ending was a positive one (where a revolutionary situation was resolved with reforms) the Chartist era in England of 1819-1867 and the Russian reform period of 1855-1881.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">225ff: England's Chartist Period: the key ameliorating factors were Britain's Empire, which allowed millions of commoners to emigrate to places like Canada, Australia and elsewhere which was a sort of pressure venting for demographic pressures; also elites emigrated too; there were reforms also, for example, England extended voting rights to smaller landowners and certain urban residents in 1832 with the Reform Act, also the Poor Laws of 1834, also the repeal of the Corn Laws which helped food prices; The parliament concessions on voting were forced after sustained public protest and near-rebellion, elites were divided on how to deal with all the unrest, but they ultimately at least partly met the demands of the immiserated majority.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">228ff: On Russia's reform period of 1855 to 1881, components of this involved the tremendous number of different peasant protests, Alexander II freed the serfs (kind of), starting with a speech Alexander gave in 1856, they were officially freed in 1861; see also Russia's shocking defeat in the Crimean War which delegitimized the Tsar's regime; there was "downward social mobility" for many nobles; Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. <b>[It's fascinating that the author considers this a "success story" when just a couple decades later the unrest and destabilization of 1905 happened, and then twelve years later 1917 happened! This was just a preamble to much worse things in Russia, it is hardly seems an example of a "good outcome" as the author claims.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">233: Turchin really comes up empty-handed on what we can learn from these success stories; one is to have a lot of land or have an empire; also per the author both countries had "leaders who were willing to sacrifice short-term selfish advantage for long-term collective good." Both of these are rather squishy things to "learn."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">236: Why democracies are vulnerable to plutocratic elites; on the sociological concept of the <b>"iron law of oligarchy": when an interest group acquires a lot of power it starts using this power in self-interested ways;</b> see also the transition in Western democracies from class-based party systems to multi-elite party systems, <b>we have a perfect example with the Democratic party, which represented the working class in the earlier parts of the 20th century, but by 2000 became the party of the credentialed 10%.</b> Further, the wealthiest can buy mass media, fund think tanks, reward influencers, and build enormous power to sway the electorate.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">239: It's fascinating that the author cites Denmark and Austria as two countries that are well-governed states: the comportment of Austria's government during the COVID era and the mRNA mandate era was absolutely appalling, the polar opposite of a well-governed state. Not to mention both of these countries have also given away a significant amount of their sovereignty to the supranational European Union.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Appendix:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter A1: A New Science of History</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>247ff: I hate to say it, but this appendix--which is supposed to explain the details of his discipline--is masturbatory.</b> First we hear a cute story, borrowing from the science fiction story <i>In the Land of the Blind</i> by Michael Flynn, then a discussion of Asimov's <i>Foundation</i> stories [that, Turchin tells us, did not influence him or his career choices at all, not at all], then we get a rundown on the author's career trajectory. <b>The reader does not need to know this. Note also the extended discussion of Isaac Asimov's <i>Foundation</i> novels is copy-pasta from <i>War and Peace and War</i>.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">254: On the Osipov-Lanchester equations for gauging the outcome of military conflicts; the author adds other factors: army size, casualty infliction rates, army replacement rates, total population, industrial base and morale; on Lanchester's square law: the idea that an incremental factor is multiplicative between the two opponents.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">262ff: Historical roots of the science of history: see Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Quetelet, Tolstoy; see also Nicholas Rashevsky's 1968 book <i>Looking at History Through Mathematics</i>; on how the "great man" theory of history is anti-cliodynamic; see Thomas Carlisle, the Scottish philosopher widely credited with advancing it. <b>[Odd to see no mention here of Herotodus, the literal "father of history."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter A2: A Historical Microscope</b></div><div dir="auto">269ff: Starting off with another cutesy story: this time it's about aliens observing Earth over time and speculating about the life arc of the United States of America. This does not really work structurally, it makes the appendices seem unserious and light.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">273: On converting history into data: "When there are resources like the Domesday Book... we eagerly squeeze them for any information they can yield. But where such troves are not available (which is the usual case), we have to rely on indirect indicators, or 'proxies.'" <b>[Unfortunately, this is where the GIGO happens, this is often where the made-up stuff begins and the "science" breaks down; I would expect that all the time there's very little actual data to go to, and most of it subject to wide interpretation and narrative. And this of course says nothing about the fact we can only consider data that "survived" a sort of gigantic informational survivor bias problem. This data will always be tremendously gappy and suspect.]</b> This information process would be something like paleoclimatology where you use proxies to reconstruct climate dynamics reaching millions of years back: ice cores, tree rings, pollen counts <b>[these would <i>never</i> be used to fulfill a narrative of course... would they?]</b>; in human history we have proxies like composition of pollen blown by wind onto lakes that show up in sediment: this can measure land clearing via cores taken from lake bottoms; also measuring spurts of building activity by dating the precise year of building beams; measuring human waste and garbage; also human remains: here you can measure height via single bone, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">280: Using parish records of births, deaths and baptisms statistics as raw data for family reconstruction via data that dates back to 1538 in England; note that England's first census wasn't until 1801.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">283: The author switched study domains from theoretical biology to cliodynamics, struggling with convincing other ecology colleagues and empiricists of the value of mathematical models, pointing to population models like the Lotka-Volterra equations for predator-prey cycles (this was a simultaneous discovery in 1925-26 explaining boom and bust cycles of many animals). </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">285ff: On the Seshat Global History Databank; the idea here is to have a historical database of everything; launched in 2011; note the discussion here on how to code different pieces of data <b>[I'd mention here that as healthcare has migrated to electronic records, there's a "coding" problem that exists there in the sense that we force analog medical information into a Procrustean coding system, and this is causing downstream second-order effects and problems with healthcare in many ways no one expected.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">286ff: An unintentionally amusing section here on how the actual work is done: the author described how at first they were using actual "experts" to put their data into his Seshat database, but they then realized this was not a good use of their time because these experts had to "fill in hundreds of boxes" (!!!) so they started doing this work with research assistants [holy cow what a terrible job], of course these RAs are under "close supervision" by "PhD level social scientists" [I can't help but hear a voiceover in my head saying "really really please believe me, our data is amazingly good, and very accurately entered, we supervise, please clap].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">289: On the big question on the emergence of the State: How did it the so-called "great Holocene transformation" happen, such that nearly all people today live in large-scale states?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter A3: The Structural Dynamic Approach</b></div><div dir="auto">[This is a general criticism of "traditional" history (history based on narrative), and a criticism of what the author calls "amateur armchair theorists": he believes these amateur armchair theorists use both cherry picking (choosing only historical examples that fit) and the Bed of Procrustes (stretching data here, cutting off some of the data there) to force historical events to conform to whatever their theory happens to be (whether the theory is one of historical cycles or whatever). He then claims that "Cliodynamics is different" and that it uses historical knowledge "in an objective scientific way"--as if doing this with indirectly interpreted and/or tremendously gappy data itself isn't ever subject to these [and many, many other] problems as well. This chapter starts off really reeking of doth protest too much. <b>[I'll also note that if you read Turchin's book </b><i style="font-weight: bold;">War and Peace and War</i><b>, pay particular attention to Chapter 11, where he force-fits the decline of Rome into his "asabiya" and "integrative-disintegrative" cycles model--adding epicycles where needed, explaining away deviations, etc.--in quite a striking example of a Procrustean Bed. <i>It is right there for all to see in the author's own previous work</i>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>295: [An apparent error here on pension math, which leads the reader to a type of scientific meta-error: first the pension math error: the author talks about demographers trying to calculate and make projections of Social Security liabilities going forward: yes, he is correct that they use models and a lot of math, but he leaves out how </b><i style="font-weight: bold;">remarkably</i><b> sensitive these models are to tiny changes in underlying assumptions (you can easily make a pension plan appear under- or over-funded with minuscule changes in your discount rate, your inflation assumption, your equity market returns assumptions, your interest rate assumptions, etc.). And this brings us to a catastrophic metaproblem common to all soft sciences, including sociology and "cliodynamics": what are those critically important assumptions, and how can they be manipulated or used to create the result that is "needed"? Many "scientific" domains are easily subject to manipulations like this to fit favored narratives or fulfill specific political needs of the day: we have seen this blatantly done in economics, medicine, and of course in all social sciences. I think what's ultimately frustrating here is the author's implicit claim that his domain sits in some sort of pure fact-based, narrative-free realm, when self-evidently there are countless vectors by which his field can (and will) be manipulated--manipulated ironically to serve the purposes of the very elites he writes about.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">R.L. Storey: <i>The End of the House of Lancaster</i></div><div dir="auto">Anne Case and Angus Deaton: <i>Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism</i></div><div dir="auto">Jack A. Goldstone: <i>Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World</i></div><div dir="auto">Suetonius: <i>The Twelve Caesars</i> </div><div dir="auto">Barbara Walter: <i>How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them</i></div><div dir="auto"><i><br /></i></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-78033082402104515792024-03-06T06:40:00.000-08:002024-03-06T18:31:22.027-08:00War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires by Peter Turchin<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Instructive but uneven book that pairs well with <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-fourth-turning-is-here-by-neil-howe.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Fourth Turning Is Here</a><b>[*]</b>, as both books offer similar paradigms of wheels-within-wheels generational cycles turning inside longer-term civilizational cycles.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Readers get a rapid and mostly overwhelming review of world history, as author Peter Turchin gives various examples of how his "meta-ethnic frontier theory" drives the rise ("imperiogenesis") and decline ("imperiopathosis") of empires. We start with a tour of medieval Russia's evolution into a unified state, and then proceed through more and more and <i>more</i> examples from history, each involving explanatory whirlwind tours of massive historical eras.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Which brings us to a problem with Turchin's attempt to "model" history. First, he has to explain his model, ideally using an interesting example: he does this successfully with medieval Russia. But before you can really prove that your model fits history, <i>you have to discuss all the relevant history</i>, which means racing pell-mell through centuries, even millennia, without grounding or context. Four-fifths of the way through the book, Turchin even admits "it becomes tedious to read about one secular cycle after another." You can say that again.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">So, if your book is geared to the lay reader, as this one is, this means loading that lay reader down with a "tedious" amount of ungrounded history, much of it superficial. This might <i>still</i> be tolerable for readers with a deep substrate of historical knowledge in place, but a lay reader lacking such a substrate will struggle to follow along. Two particularly painful examples here are Chapter 6, which gives a whirlwind tour of Roman history, followed by Chapter 7, which gives a downright cyclonic tour of <i>eight centuries</i> of medieval Europe--guaranteed to lose even the most historically grounded reader. Lay readers will find these chapters (and others) painstaking, overwhelming, or both.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Turchin could have drastically tightened all of the historical expository to make the book more readable, more organized, and a hundred pages shorter. But then it would be a short sociology book that assumes historical context most readers wouldn't have. I'm neither writer nor scholar enough to solve this problem. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, to the extent that we can trust a rapidly hypocognizing Wikipedia, Turchin is apparently thought of as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin" target="_blank">one of the founders of cliodynamics</a>. But to this writer, "cliodynamics" looks and smells suspiciously like cliometrics, where cliometrics is an <i>econometric</i> domain founded by Robert Fogel (1926-2013). See for example Fogel's striking book on the economics of slavery, <i>Without Consent or Contract</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Footnote:</b></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><b>[*]</b> Turchin would almost certainly <i>hate</i> this pairing, as <a href="https://peterturchin.com/prophecy-fourth-turning/" target="_blank">he considers the "Fourth Turning" paradigm unscientific and "Procrustean."</a> There's a certain irony to his claim, however, as we will see Turchin perform his own rather crude Procrustean attempt to force-fit the decline of Rome to his model (see Chapter 11).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Once again, a friendly warning: don't read any further. What follows are just my notes to the text. Life is short!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Introduction: "So Peace Brings Warre and Warre Brings Peace"</b></div><div dir="auto">1-2: Reference here to Hari Selden from Asimov's <i>Foundation</i> trilogy, fortelling the decay and collapse of Empire via the fictional domain of psychohistory, but unable to account for self-referential participants in the model: "knowledge of the prediction must be withheld from the people whose collective behavior is predicted." "Can we design a theory for the collapse of mighty empires[?]" the author asks. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>3: "This book focuses on empires. Why did some--initially small and insignificant--nations go on to build mighty empires, whereas other nations failed to do so? And why do the successful empire builders invariably, given enough time, lose their empires? Can we understand how imperial powers rise and why they fall?"</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: In agrarian societies a 1-2% elite typically holds most of the power and wealth.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>5: "Meta-ethnic communities"</b> like Western civilization or Islamic civilization, etc., but also broad groupings like Celts or Turco-Mongolian steppe nomads, etc. "Cultural difference is greatest between people belonging to different meta-ethnic communities" to the point that people deny the very humanity of those on the other side of the divide.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>5-6: "Asabiya":</b> 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun's word for "the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action," and a dynamic that can increase or decrease over time. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>6-7: The meta-ethnic frontier concept:</b> The frontier between meta-ethnic groups is an imperial boundary where there's a "fault-line": one meta-ethnic group may trade or raid to get access to imperial wealth; also the threat of violence or prospective gain are integrative forces that produce cooperation among ethnic groups on either side of the fault-line/boundary [cooperation to unify in opposition to the meta-ethnic group on the <i>other</i> side of that fault-line]. Gradually each side incorporates more and more ethnically similar groups, and there's of course <i>another</i> meta-ethnic group on the <i>other</i> side doing the same which helps further unify your team in response. The author's examples here are Russia and America (Chapters 1-2), Germans and Arabs on the Roman frontier (Chapters 3-4), the origins of Rome (Chapter 6) and the rise of the European great powers (Chapter 7).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">7: On ultrasociality: humanity's ability to combine into cooperating groups of millions of unrelated individuals, this led to increasing the scale of human societies by huge leaps.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">7: Part 1 covers <b>imperiogenesis</b>, the rise of empires; Part 2 covers <b>imperiopathosis</b>, the decline of empires.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">8: A complete cycle, including "a benign integrative phase" and "the troubled disintegrative phase" is around 2-3 centuries; "secular cycles" the author calls them.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10: "Wheels within wheels within wheels" dynamics: the idea of empire cycles, civil war cycles, fathers-and-sons cycles, asabiya cycles, all of which interrelate and interact, further complicated by dynamic feedback.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part I: Imperiogenesis: The Rise of Empires</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: A Band Of Adventurers Defeats A Kingdom: Ermak's Conquering Cossacks</b></div><div dir="auto">15ff: Extended story of a group of Cossacks defending a sort of neomercantile outpost for the Russian Tsar, run by the [unfortunately named] Stroganov family, they recruited Cossacks to attack Turko-Mongolic steppe raiders who were attacking Stroganov and Tsarist territory.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23ff: The author discusses previous engagements between steppe peoples and Russians prior to the unification of Russia, thus their peoples were picked off one by one as the Mongols were able to conquer much of Russia. In the 13th century, Mongols were better unified despite being themselves a wide range of different types of peoples. The author calls Mongol Army a "well-oiled social mechanism."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">24ff: On the paradox of cooperation among violent or militarily organized people; see for example the so-called Oriental despotism of Genghis Khan. The context here is collective action for the purposes of the functioning of an Empire; per the author, the concept of Oriental despotism is "sociological nonsense" since one person can't run a regime that large against the wishes of all of his subjects; tyrants need the support of an elite, and at least your elites need to be internally cohesive. "In other words, oppression can only be accomplished from the basis of cooperation, paradoxical as it sounds."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">25: On the false assumption held in Western societies that non-democratic societies are held together by force alone.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27ff: Note that the Golden Horde, the Mongolian peoples unified under Batu Khan, stayed unified for 200 years until the late 1400s, when it fragmented into a number of unstable principalities, this was during the Russian resurgence in the 1500s; the Tatar/Turko-Mongolian peoples fell into a state of dissolution, whereas now the Russian peoples (on the other side of the meta-ethnic fault-line) were "cooperating" much more effectively. The Russian peoples were consolidating, centralizing; the opposite of the disintegration of the Turko-Mongolian people.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>28: Noting the rise and fall of these two societies, both large territorial empires alongside each other: in the 13th century Russia fragmented and "had no chance against the Mongol steamroller" but in the 16th century Russia was the monolith that rolled over "the squabbling Tatar khanates."</b> "Why did the Tatars lose their social cohesion? How did the Russians acquire it?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Life On The Edge: The Transformation of Russia--and America</b></div><div dir="auto">31: The author starts off with a nomad/farmer paradigm: the nomads saw themselves as riders and manly warriors; they saw the farmers as doing feminine work, "dirt grubbers" and terrible soldiers, but yet farmers had wealth and grain; the farmers saw the nomads as uncivilized, unlettered, barbarians, murderers, slavers; these antagonisms goes back to Cain with his fields and Abel with his flocks (the early Hebrews were herders, thus Cain in his fields was the bad guy); note also settled cultivators tended to adopt Christianity, nomads tended to adopt Islam.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">32: "Steppe and forest" were a sort of fault line between these two very different civilizations; with quite a bit of violence, occasional peaceful trade, and periodically, genocide. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">33ff: Note that in the 1500s Russia was under assault from nearly every direction, with its people being captured and enslaved, sold off to slave ships in the Black Sea, attacks from Tatars from different directions, also warring with the Lithuanian/Polish Kingdom as well. The author makes the argument that these external threats helped unify Russian society.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38ff: Discussion here of the various frontier strategies of Muscovy during this period; setting up forest barriers called abatis; other barriers to limit the raiders' mobility; fortified defensive lines via a chain of fortified towns; also a huge Great Wall-type barrier, completed with significant labor and investment. Here we can start to see the emergence of the nation of Russia which unified a range of different peoples: Cossacks patrolling the steppes, farmers and peasants on the frontier; nothing of this substrate was in place in the 13th century, but by the 16th century a solid substrate was in place. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">41: Comments on Moscow. Russians behaving "in a collectively astute way, even though acting so cost individual hardship or worse... The sense of solidarity and willingness to sacrifice for the common good were not based on a rational calculation; they had much deeper foundations." Basically centuries of conflict with better-organized empires around them caused Russians to form their own empire with a strong sense of a collective (and primarily Christian) identity. <b>[Obviously the reader can't help but think here of the apotheosis of this collective identity: Russia's performance against the Nazis in World War II]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45: On the "enserfment" of Russian peasantry, which happened later than people think, and by degrees, culminating in the Law Code of 1649, and then reached its peak of oppression toward the end of the 18th century. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46ff: The author started offering his "frontier hypothesis" with the example of Russia, he now extends it to other examples in history "to understand how large territorial empires can be assembled and held together." The forest-steppe fault line divided nomad and farming peoples, while the presence of "other" unified farming peoples and nomad peoples on opposite sides.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>48: Interesting to learn of Ukraine defecting from the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom to go under Russia's protection in 1653 due to peasant oppression as well as for religious reasons (Orthodox Ukraine vs aggressively Catholic Poland).</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48ff: Exemplar of the steppe/forest paradigm in the American prairie; note the Indian wars were more deadly in proportional terms than any other wars in American history. 30% casualty rates were common (see the very first day of the war between Virginia settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy in 1622, with 347 massacred out of a settler population of 1200) vs a 0.3% casualty rate in WWII. The atrocities were enough to unify both sides against each other. <b>"...any society subjected to such pressures for generations would be transformed."</b> European settlers would find common ground against a "red" other. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55: Concluding with a "macrohistorical generalization": <b>"People originating on fault-line frontiers become characterized by cooperation and high capacity for collective action, which in turn allows them to build large and powerful territorial states."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Slaughter in the Forest: At the <i>Limites</i> of the Roman Empire</b></div><div dir="auto">57: Europe in the Mediterranean during the first millennium AD, dominated by Rome, thus relatively stationary imperial frontiers that we can examine to test the "fault-line frontier theory." Basically Turchin's theory says that <b>"all large states in the post-Roman landscape should have been established by peoples originating from the Roman frontier."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57: Note that there were four primary frontier peoples: Germans (and later Slavs) on the north, African and Arabian peoples (Berbers and Arabs) on the south, Eurasian peoples (e.g., Huns) from the east, and also the Parthian Empire to the east.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59: 476 AD: the deposition of Romulus Augustus, the last Western Roman Emperor; this is thought of as the date of the collapse of Rome, which was replaced in Europe by a number of states. The seven largest that survived from 476 to 1000 AD included the Franks, the Ostrogoth Kingdom, the Visigoth Kingdom, the Avars, the Bulgars, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Byzantine Empire: also note in the south in Africa the Arab Caliphate and the Fatimid Caliphate, and furthermore the kingdom of Burgundians and Langobards, smaller kingdoms later annexed by the Frankish Empire; see also the huge but very short-lived Empire of the Huns, which peaked in 440 AD, collapsing after the death of its founder, Attila. The author points out here that all of these empires match up with the hypothesis of Chapter 2, with the exception of the Byzantines--which he argues is only an apparent exception, to be discussed later in this chapter. <b>[Note that there's a lot here, this by itself might overwhelm a reader new to post-Roman history.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60: The Romans called their frontiers <i>limites</i>, the singular is limes, and this is where English gets the word "limit."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60: The Romans called the peoples living east of the Rhine "the Germans," but they had many different ethnic identities and did not (yet) see themselves as a single people.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">62ff: On the attack against the Legate Varus and destruction of his army by the Germans in the Teutoberg Forest (AD 9); also the gradual unification/confederation of German tribes against Rome; whereas just a century before (100-ish BC) they were just small random marauding tribes of different German peoples, not organized in this way at all; note also that in the absence of a Roman threat, intra-German rivalry caused the Germans to turn back against one another. "As long as a powerful external force threatened the Germans, the tribes were capable of uniting and inflicting defeats on it. When the immediate threat went, however, so did the unity." Over the course of the next several decades Rome essentially conquered all of Germany, annexing some of its territory, and otherwise establishing forward defenses elsewhere in territory that they didn't think worth taking. "As a result, the Rhine frontier became stationary."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>67: Ironically that stationary frontier turned out to be disastrous in the long run, over the next three or four centuries this frontier "transformed the social and political organization of the Germans," leading to powerful tribal confederations of the different German tribes as well as the Frank French tribes, eventually the Franks evolved into the only state that was able to unify most of Western Europe, the Carolingian Empire.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">69: On military pressure obliterating the weak and strengthening the strong of society; also on the conflict-prone region of territory extending 100 miles from the frontier between Roman territory and Germanic territory in both directions, these unstable regions functioned as human "selection mechanisms" on steroids. Also transfer of prestige goods, trade, transfer of ideas, techniques and other cultural elements, for example military discipline, the value of keeping records in bureaucracy, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">72: Note also a sharpening ideological and religious divide between Romans and Germans as Rome Christianized and the Germans consolidated on the cult of Odin; a type of civilizational fault line to borrow the expression from Samuel Huntington's book <i>The Clash of Civilizations</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">74: Starting in the 3rd century AD we start to see many mentions of different German and Frankish tribes in the record: the Gauls, the Saxons, the Franks, the Vandals, the Alemanni, etc., during a period of political instability in Rome that followed the assassination of emperor Severus Alexander in 235 AD. This gave way to Rome's so-called Thirty Tyrants era, from 259-268; during this period Roman legions were pulled from the frontiers to be used in Roman civil conflicts, this led to many German and Frankish and Goth raids throughout Roman territory. The Goths actually wiped out a Roman army in 251 AD and killed Emperor Decius.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">74: In 285 AD Diocletian reunited the empire; but then 378 AD was the Battle of Adrianople, between Rome and the Visigoths; the Visigoths defeated the Roman Army and slew the emperor. The Battle of Adrianople signaled the final decline of the Roman Empire in the West.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75: intriguing quote here. "It is interesting to note that the Romans were unable to subdue the Alemanni, despite repeatedly defeating them in battle. By contrast, after they were forcibly joined to the Frankish Empire, the Alemanni served it quite loyally. The most likely explanation is that the ethnic gap between the Franks and Alemanni was fairly trivial compared to that between the Alemanni and the Romans." <b>[Similar dialects, similar religious practices, etc. You don't find common ground with another group until you both find a common enemy that unites you!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75: Also some linguistic history for geeks here: the Frankish language has a direct descendant today, Flemish. And the Alemannic language has a direct descendant in the Alsatian dialect of German.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76: Here we wrap up the discussion of the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire and the ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis that happened among the German and Frankish peoples at the interface with the Roman Empire. Now we move on to another frontier, the Danubian frontier, for more complex and more entangled interactions.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77: "What we can do here, however, is address one of the greatest puzzles of medieval European history: why the Eastern Roman Empire (which we call Byzantine), survived the fall of Rome by a thousand years." [The Eastern Empire collapsed in 1453 vs 476 for the Western Empire.] The author starts by saying the question is "ill-posed."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77-8: The intellectual tradition of dumping on the Byzantines began in the 18th century with Edward Gibbon's <i>The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</i>, where he raced through the cohesive and expansionary period of the Byzantine Empire in just one chapter and then devoted the rest of three volumes to the decadent/declining periods.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">78ff: Per the author, a better way to phrase the ill-posed question is to ask how it was that a new imperial nation was born in the Balkans/Anatolia region while the old one collapsed; also notes that the Byzantines were an entirely separate people from the Romans of the Western Empire. Discussion here of very high-level differences between Byzantines and Romans; Latin- versus Greek-speaking, worldly and practical versus otherworldly and mystical, Roman versus Hellenistic, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79-80: Note also that as Rome started to have more of its military conscripted from its peripheral tribute peoples, more power leaked from the center. <b>[One truism of history: You can't depend quite as much on a military made up of people other than your own...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">81ff: Diocletian as one of a string of emperors basically put in power by Roman military; he retired and gave power to Constantine who took over in 305 AD. Constantine imposed Christianity and founded Constantinople in 324 AD, which played a major role in the survival and flowering of the Byzantine Empire. What followed in the western part of the Roman Empire, however, was a period of imperiopathosis as it was displaced by the East. "This period [the author means here the 4th through the 6th centuries AD] is a sort of transitional phase between Rome, which really fell in the third century, and Byzantium, which fully formed only after the shock of the Arabic conquests." [uh, which were when? He leaves the reader in the lurch, assuming knowledge that at the least I don't have...]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">83: Back to the Battle of Adrianople (AD 378) where the Visigoths wiped out emperor Valens and his army <b>[<a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-day-of-barbarians-by-alessandro.html" target="_blank">this is well told in the book <i>The Day of the Barbarians</i> by the way, recommend!</a>]</b>, setting into motion a chain of events that led to weakening frontier defenses all over Roman territory and eventually the sack of Rome in 476.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">84: On the dispute about the nature of Christ between the Nestorians, the Monophysites, and the Chalcedonians, religion as a symbolic marker used to distinguish "us" from "them."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">85: Various attacks and sieges of Constantinople and its territory in the 7th and 8th centuries by the Arabs which "forged the Byzantine nation" after a period of secular decline. [This is what the author was referring to four pages ago on page 81, apparently.] "When the pressure abated at the end of the 8th century, the Byzantines resumed their empire building."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Asabiya in the Desert: Ibn Khaldun Discovers the Key to History</b></div><div dir="auto">89ff: Ibn Khaldun, the famous philospher, born in 1332 in Seville in Muslim Andalusia; lost his parents at age 17 to the Black Death; then when it was clear that Seville was about to fall to the Christian Reconquista, his extended family moved to northwest Africa. Ibn Khaldun plays various roles as advisors to different sultans and states in Africa, then on his way to a pilgrimage to Mecca he is retained by the ruler of Egypt to be a chief justice, then he finds himself in Damascus when it was besieged by Timur [Tamerlane]. Timur wanted to meet the world-famous philosopher, he had him as his guest for some seven weeks in his camp.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">92: The desert as hostile environment, as a "natural selection mechanism" that forges internal solidarity in communities; or as Ibn Khaldun said; only tribes held together by <i>asabiya</i> can live in the desert." Also; nomadic peoples from the semi-arid regions of North Africa tended to produce excellent warriors.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>93: On Ibn Khaldun's cycles of conquering, then decadence, then dissolution and a loss of asabiya, then replacement by another regime.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">94ff: On the role of religion in creating coherent peoples. Islam offering stability to a war-torn region.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104: "Here then a powerful general principle of world history is uncovered: a close connection exists between fault-line frontiers and new, expansionist states."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: The Myth of Self-Interest: And the Science of Cooperation</b></div><div dir="auto">107ff: On the amazing support of the European populace for the decision to go to war in 1914; England did not even need to do any conscription until 1916 (!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">108: The author criticizes "rational choice theory" of the 20th century which dominated social sciences during the century. <b>[I didn't know it dominated sociology but it sure did dominate economics and finance.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">109ff: Contrasting the ideas of Machiavelli with the words of French King Louis IX who wanted his son to govern the kingdom with loyalty and fealty to his people; on Machiavelli's failed political career and how his book <i>The Prince</i> was "vehemently rejected" by his contemporaries, only gradually gaining ground in European thinking in the modern period. See also Thomas Hobbes and his work <i>Leviathan,</i> Bernard Mandeville's work <i>The Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits</i> and of course Adam Smith's <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> and the "invisible hand" argument; per the author, all of these are now systematized into what is now known as the Theory of Rational Choice, where people are rational actors trying to maximize utility.</div><div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto">112ff: On the collective action problem in rational choice theory; "rational self-interested agents cannot join together in a functioning society" per the author; also on evolutionary fitness and natural selection, Darwin was puzzled on how sociology evolved <b>[Note: <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/02/radical-by-nature-revolutionary-life-of.html" target="_blank">as we know from Albert Costa's biography of Alfred Russel Wallace</a>, Darwin had difficulty seeing the big picture with his own theory, he had difficulty applying it to various levels of the system, like on a cultural level, a societal level, etc]</b>; the arrival of William D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection; also the "reciprocal altruism" concept from biologist Robert Trivers and political scientist Robert Axelrod; the problem however is none of these explain ultrasociality, or cooperation on societal level.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">119ff: Society consists of a few types of people: </div><div dir="auto"><b>* "knaves":</b> self-interested rational agents who will tend to free-ride unless forced to contribute to the common good</div><div dir="auto"><b>* "saints":</b> unconditional cooperators</div><div dir="auto"><b>* "moralists":</b> conditional cooperators who will contribute to the collective but in the absence of a mechanism to punish non-contributors they will withdraw their cooperation</div><div dir="auto">The idea here per the author is the capacity for cooperation is hardwired into humans, although to varying degrees.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">124: Thus in World War I, "The initial surge of volunteers must have been entirely saints and moralists." They then put pressure on knaves to do the same: see for example the white feather phenomenon in England where women actually would be enforcers, giving military age men not in uniform a white feather to indicate cowardice. <b>[A disturbing thought here is how a society that can pull these strings and can manipulate "enforcement" using its own people (through persuasion and propaganda) will generally be "more fit" on a collective level]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">125ff: On group selection rather than individual selection; also human cognitive abilities allow people to remember past behavior of others; also we can have a second-order here (more or less) of the ability to keep track of those who <i>failed to punish cheaters</i>, and punish <i>them</i>. [Moralize the moralizers, essentially] On the benefits of cooperative hunting, especially for large game; and then warfare as the most important force of group selection in human civilization; warfare is almost ubiquitous among small scale hunter-gatherer societies and former societies, see Lawrence Kelly and his evidence that 20-60% of males in these societies die in wars.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">132: On Dunbar's number.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">133ff: On human cognition and symbolic thinking; symbolic demarcation of a group; also on nested layers of demarcation/identity: in Indiana a person can think of himself as a Hoosier as well as a midwesterner, an American, a member of the West, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Born to Be Wolves: The Origins of Rome</b></div><div dir="auto">139: The author uses Rome as a case study to test the theory that "imperial nations arise on meta-ethnic frontiers"; starting with a bird's-eye view of the emergence of Rome.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">140: The author posits a zone of contact between civilization and barbarism along the Mediterranean coast of Europe, citing it as a typical meta-ethnic frontier, with conflict between an aggressive Celtic culture and a civilized coastal region; in the 4th century BC and in the centuries that followed, three great powers emerged in the Mediterranean: Carthage, Macedon and Rome, with Rome emerging as the dominant civilization by the first century BC.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">142ff: Rome emerging on the frontier between Etruscan and Latin cultures; Decentralization and disintegration in the 5th century BC during the Roman aristocracy's revolt against the last king, Tarquin the Proud; then onto Rome's conversion to an oligarchic republic that would rule for five centuries; interesting discussion here about the increasing impoverishment of the people, how they borrowed increasingly from the wealthy and fell into a form of debt slavery across society; also note a sort of suspicious cooperation between the plebians and the patricians, as the plebs would periodically secede from society (this effectively prevented the upper classes from forming an army) as a sort of periodic blackmail to obtain concessions from the ruling classes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">146ff: Problems during the 5th century: plagues, wars with various regional peoples: the Volsci, the Etruscans/Veii; Rome managed to consolidate its territory and by the end of the 5th century BC had conquered and stabilized the Etruscan/Latin frontier. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">147ff: However, then the Gallic sack of Rome happened in 390 BC. These were Celtic peoples, although the Romans called them "Gauls." "The intensity of the new frontier dwarfed ethnic divisions on the Italian peninsula, such as that between the Etruscans and the Latins." This then produced a much clearer fault line, this time unifying the Italian peninsula peoples against the culturally much different Gauls; the Gauls inspired "intense feelings of loathing and terror" in Romans; after Rome was sacked by the Gauls, the "experience left deep scars on the Roman's psyche." See how the frequent conflicts against the Gauls during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC basically robustified the Romans, forced them into collective cooperation, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">152: On Hannibal and the conflict between Rome and Carthage; also Hannibal's cooperation with Gallic troops that he recruited en route to Rome; because Hannibal used so many Gallic warriors the author argues this conflict could be thought of as yet another episode in the struggle of Rome against Gaul.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>153: On the second-order effects of the war with the Gauls; Rome settled its socio-economic conflicts between the patricians and plebeians; the Etruscans, Veiians and other peninsular people warred with Rome instantly ceased fighting and joined the "collective" of Rome.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>154: Interesting here to see how far the Celtic/Gallic peoples penetrated all over the region, throughout Iberia (forming a mixed race called Celtiberians), throughout France, along the Danube, all the way to the Black Sea, also into Macedon, Greece and Thrace, and even into Asian Minor and Anatolia which became known as Galatia (the land of Celts). Wild!</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">158: On the Romans' curious knack for losing battles but winning wars. On Rome's fascinating ability to recover from disasters like the defeat at Cannae during the second Punic War against Hannibal; note also that Rome lost one third of its Senate during this period, which is an indication of the flatness of their society in those days: clearly the senators were in there fighting too...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">163: Interesting thoughts comparing and contrasting Spartan culture with peak early/middle-era Roman culture, both cultures abhorred excess and decadence; but the Romans were willing to assimilate and admit different peoples around them into their civilization and even into their elites; <b>Spartans had tremendous levels of <i>asabiya</i>, but without the same assimilative tendencies: they tend to enslave or engage in constant conflict with nearby peoples:</b> the Messenians were a perfect example of an enslaved people who were never integrated into Spartan civilization, and upon the first Spartan defeat in 371 BC, "the Messenians immediately seceded, and that was the end of Sparta as an important player in Greek politics."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">167ff: The author likewise compares and contrasts Athenian behavior with the Delian League, contrasting that with Roman assimilation policies; where Athens tended to extract and exploit value from the Delian League peoples (although not to the extent Sparta did to the Messenians). The author also contrasts Athens and Sparta with the Macedonian Empire, which was more assimilative during its empire period as well as during its period as a buffer state with Rome. The concluding idea here is that throughout the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD we've seen many many examples of "meta-ethnic frontier theory" borne out; next we move on to the second millennium AD to see further examples.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: A Medieval Black Hole: The Rise of the Great European Powers on Carolingian Marches</b></div><div dir="auto">171ff: On the three imperial ages of Europe: </div><div dir="auto">1) The Roman Empire on the fault line between Mediterranean civilization and Celtic barbarism,</div><div dir="auto">2) The Second Imperial Age: the Empire of the Franks (under Charlemagne and the Carolingians) and Germanic peoples (who created various empires with various cycles of alternating integration and disintegration</div><div dir="auto">3) The Third Imperial Age: basically the last 500 years: note that no single empire dominated Europe during this period, there were always several great powers competing. See also the interesting claim that Europe never really unified beyond the level that the Frankish Empire managed to unify it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">172: The crowning of Charlemagne, Christmas Day AD 800, when the Carolinian Empire united the regions that today include modern France, Benelux, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, north and central Italy, and part of the Iberian peninsula. After Charlemagne died in 814 AD the Frankish Empire started to experience various levels of disintegration across multiple regions: against Islam on the southwest, Vikings on the northwest, Slavs on the Northeast, and Magyars on the southeast; the author looks at each of these in turn. <b>[Again, whirlwind tours of history!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">173ff: 732 AD: Battle of Tours in southern France by Charlemagne's grandfather Charles Martel, initiating a centuries-long retreat of the Muslim wave. This was a primary meta-ethnic frontier as well as a cultural and economic fault line: the "Iberian frontier," between Islam and Christianity. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">177: [Interesting quick comment by the author about how during periods of peace social conditions and socioeconomic structures hardened, but during periods of war they are often were many opportunities for people to change social station dramatically through the conflict; the author gives simple examples of how a peasant could become a "caballero" just by unseating a Muslim cavalryman: you would be awarded his horse and his weapons, this is just a simple example <b>but it brings to mind some more big-picture notions: such as during long periods of stability you get more of a calcified/ossified social system and much less social mobility, whereas during a war everything is up in the air, all bets are off and you or your family can leap into the aristocracy or get wiped out, dramatic shifts can happen.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">177ff: On various parallels between the Iberian peninsula and the Russian steppe: high cooperation among soldiers, high asabiya and collective unity, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">181ff: Moving on from the Iberian meta-ethnic frontier to the northern France meta-ethnic zone, the region of the Seine River to the Loire to the south and to the Somme in the North, this region was called Francia during the Carolingian period. The fault line had Germanic Odin worshipers on one side and Romance language-speaking Christians on the other (This was the territory held by Roman patrician Sagarius which fell to the Franks under Clovis in 486). The Merovingians under Clovis adopted Roman-style administration for their budding empire and thus Romano-Gallic patricians were incorporated into the Frankish ruling elite, which was already a mongrelized people with Celts, Germanic farmers, Roman legionnaires, all added to the Frankish peoples.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182-3: Note the idiosyncrasy of Brittany, where there were Celts who had left the British Isles after the collapse of Rome to escape raids and colonization by Picts, Irish, Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians; The Celts here established a beachhead across the English Channel in Brittany, and the Franks could never establish control over them. Another idiosyncrasy: a sort of gap in North France between Brittany and Frankish territory left room for Vikings/Scandinavians to establish themselves in a buffer territory between them. This started in 790 AD roughly, and they began raiding on both these frontiers, ultimately in 911 AD the Viking chief of Rouen named Hrolfr (or Rollo to the Franks), extracted the lands that would become eventually Normandy (the Normans) from Charles III, one of the last Carolingians. The Britons and Brittany eventually collapsed and retreated back to the British isles. The Norse raiding in the Normandy region created a separate meta-ethnic frontier in north France.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">185ff: On the concept of predatory kinship in Normandy: see examples among the Normans like the twelve sons of Tancred, quite literally a band of brothers, who were able to conquer Italy and Sicily; or William the Conqueror invading England in 1066 with a band of kinsman that crisscrossed the leadership of his army, creating a tremendous amount of Norman solidarity and high asabiya.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186ff: The meta-ethnic frontier in the British Isles between Christian Celts and pagan Germanic people until AD 70 when the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity; but with remaining meta-ethnic frontier conflicts during the 9th and 10th centuries when Britain was inundated by Viking raiders and colonizers from Scandinavia; <b>by the 11th century AD these frontier pressures had forged a heterogeneous band of German Invaders "into a cohesive English nation."</b> But this new nation was largely destroyed by William the Conqueror's army in a very close battle at Hastings in 1066, and the English leadership perished there; the Normans then killed and replaced all the remaining English nobility. This is basically the story of how Normandy was the first empire to emerge from "the meta-ethnic pressure cooker of North France," but it was not the only one to do so.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">188: Instability and a meta-ethnic frontier between the Normans and the Angevin French; note also that Normans didn't start to think of themselves as "French" until the 16th century! And the Capetians took over from the Angevins and unified northern France; then to expand to both Normandy and Flanders, then Languedoc in the south, and by the 13th century AD France became the hegemonic power in Europe.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">189: Now moving on to the northeastern frontier of Germanic tribes around the region of the river Elbe and the river Oder, this is roughly what used to be East Germany; the German people there began to abandon it with the advance of Slavic peoples expanding westward; this started during the 5th or 6th century AD, although nobody knows when or why exactly; ultimately the border between Germanic Saxons and Slavic Wends was located along the Elbe river, and this became the meta-ethnic frontier. The incursions in both directions eventually triggered the formation of the states of Czechs, Poles, later Lithuanians; other Slavic tribes that did not adopt Christianity weren't able to preserve their identity.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">191: The emergence of the Teutonic order around AD 1226; an appeal from polish Duke Konrad of Masovia for aid against the pagan Prussians in the region, who were ultimately conquered and Christianized; now the author jumps across some 400 years to the Germanic Hohenzollerns who were eventually to become the core of a resurgent Germany. Note that modern Prussians are today actually Germans who appropriated the name of the people they conquered. The original "Prussians" were destroyed as a people.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193: Discussion of the Lithuanian Empire, which emerged as a counter reaction to the arrival of the rapacious knights of the Teutonic Order, and also assaulted from the other direction by the Mongols of the Golden Horde. Another meta-ethnic pressure cooker where the Lithuanians consolidated into a people from kind of a pan-Baltic set of peasant tribes. Lithuania-Poland came from the marriage of Grand Duke Algirdas and Polish Queen Jadwiga; during the 15th century Lithuania-Poland was the largest territorial state in Europe; the Teutonic Order became a vassal of the Polish crown and finally the Slavic-Baltic state triumphed over German conquerors. But then two centuries later, in the 18th century, the Russians, who started as vassals of the Polish crown, were busily carving up Poland. <b>[Note the last few segments of this book, and this chapter in particular, have been so loose and so quick in going over so many complex geopolitical relationships that it kind of leaves the reader a little lost; the underlying history is too complex to really illustrate the authors' overall theme with much clarity.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195ff: The formation of China into various States repeatedly across the ages, thanks to the meta-ethnic frontier between Mongolia and Northern China, where we had the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols all rampaging back and forth.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">196: The establishment of the Magyars, a Hungarian state, thanks to pressure from east and west.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">197: The establishment of an Austrian power that cohered around a similar meta-ethnic fault line; note also the arrival of Turks to the east added to this fault line as well, eventually the Habsburgs conquered Turkish Hungary and made Austria a great power in 1699, and then during the 18th century they took over Spanish possessions in Italy and in the Netherlands, and continued to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Note that the Austrian Empire contained unstable, distinct imperial nations: the Hungarians and the Austrians, and they were also an amalgamation of other ethnic groups also; Spain separated when Charles V abdicated in 1558; Spain then went Philip II. <b>[This book is now getting lost in its own wreckage: it's all too complex and the author is jumping all around through Austro-Hungarian history with no real narrative gameplan]</b>, basically the Austro-Hungarian Empire was "too multi-ethnic" to survive, and it disintegrated with World War I, dismembered in 1918.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part II: Imperiopathosis: The Fall of Empires</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: The Other Side of the Wheel of Fortune: From the Glorious Thirteenth Century into the Abyss of the Fourteenth</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Chapter 8 is a weak chapter, the author's point here is to give an example of a declining empire, but this "example" would likely be interesting only to a true Dark Ages France geeks.]</b></div><div dir="auto">205ff: France's incredible success between 1200 and 1300, where it came to dominate Western Europe. But the 14th century put France right back down again for 150 years of famine, pestilence, incessant war and political disintegration. "When the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch visited France in 1360, he lamented, 'I could scarcely recognize anything I saw. The most opulent of kingdoms is a heap of ashes... Where is now Paris that was once such a great city?'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">207: On the metaphor and image of the wheel of fortune, representing the impermanence of power, riches and glory; 14th centuries troubles following 13th century successes, "The High Middle Ages were followed by the calamitous fourteenth century." Then Europe experienced the Renaissance, which was followed by the crisis of the 17th century, then followed by the Age of Enlightenment, 1789, leading into the age of revolution, 1849. Discussion here of secular cycles, roughly century-long periods of prosperity and crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">208: Taking the circle metaphor further, we have cycle after cycle of war bringing peace, peace bringing war, prosperity bringing poverty, etc, "The causation is not linear but circular."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">209ff: The author traces the economic and social cycle in France to see how a powerful state collapsed. Starting with massive population growth from 1100-1300 AD from 6 million to 22 million people; this "put the productive means of the medieval Society under a colossal strain." More aggressive agriculture, Malthusian-type problems and a Malthusian trap; see also an indication of a Malthusian trap with inflation, as the price of wheat and other commodities more than doubled between 1200 and 1300 while during this period real wages declined by a third. <b>[There are some problems here, possibly catastrophic problems, about how the author is deducing things from price increases: he is assuming implicitly that supply was stable and demand went up, yet he doesn't comment on (or know?) the monetary policy from this period, he doesn't know the starting and ending percent of land tilled, etc. I hate to be harsh, but this is pretty loose, sociologist-level math.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">211ff: By 1300 there was a vast and growing rural proletariat, not enough land for everyone to work, many of the landless peasants migrated to towns, and this population increase strained France and other Western European countries to the breaking point. Also 1315-1322 was a series of disastrous crop years and livestock pandemics that triggered major famines, reports of cannibalism, etc. Contemporaneous Chronicles claimed the third of the population perished although it was probably more like 10%. "The terrible famines of the fourteenth century left a deep imprint on the European psyche."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">213ff: Next came the Black Death: 1348-49 AD, and then returning in 1361 and again in 1374, followed by smaller outbreaks roughly once every 10 years thereafter. "By the end of the fourteenth century, the population of France was less than half of what it had been in 1300." All of this had positive effects on wages, the availability of food, the availability of land etc., basically "Malthusianism in reverse" and conditions for the lower classes improved significantly by the end of the 14th century.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">215ff: Interesting blurb here on Malthusian theory and how it <i>should have</i> resulted in an increase in population once conditions improved, but in reality population increase appeared only after 1450 (and in England not until nearly 1500). The author attributes the cause to the dynamics of the ruling class and its relations with the state; wealthy elites did very well during the 13th century as everyone else suffered.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">216ff: Long discussion here of aspects of landed gentry, incomes, etc., ultimately making the case that there was an "overproduction" of nobility in the first half of the 14th century, which resulted in the division of noble lands into smaller and smaller pieces, not enough to support everyone. This led then to more resource extraction from the peasantry. The crown even "was sliding into financial insolvency," to be discussed later in the chapter. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">222: Note that the death rate from the plague was much higher for the lowest classes but only as low as 8% for the elites; the only reigning monarch who died from it was the King Alfonso XI of Castile.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">223ff: Post the Black Death the benefits to the lower classes hurt the elites: their rents fell, wages went up, note also various peasant uprisings in Wales, the famous Jacquerie uprisings of 1358 in both England and France; basically the surplus output from peasants shrank as their numbers went lower they were had more freedom to leave estates, their wages went up and thus the income of states (which were extracted from the working classes) went down, in some cases significantly. Further we started to see French elites clash with each other, feuding over houses and estates, private wars among lesser nobility, a civil War in Brittany when Duke John III died without heirs, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">225: See also the outright rebellion in Bruges that spread: this Flemish rebellion opened a route for an English invasion and led to the Battle of Crecy. <b>[Again we have some very complicated history here that the author has to tell in very very broad and superficial brush strokes: I pity any reader that isn't already familiar with, say, the Hundred Years' War and the era of the Black Death if he actually intends to follow along.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">228: Significant Fourth Turning-type violence here among elites and across all levels of society with a tripling of the murder rate from 1300 to 1380, this rate didn't re-normalize until the end of the 15th century. The author blames this on a collapse of law and order due to a failure of the ruling class, many of whom were destitute, armed and dangerous families and clans with multi-generational feuds, murder followed by revenge etc., the nobles were really a sort of criminal underclass in the late Middle Ages.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">230: Discussion here of prior centuries where the income of the king went up with population growth and territorial expansion, which created a self-fulfilling cycle. This cycle now running in reverse. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">231: Interesting sidebar here on the order of the Templars, who created a tax-free, powerful, transnational corporation, lending money at rates lower than Italian or Jewish bankers, both to Popes as well as kings; in 1307 King Philip the Fair ordered all Templars in France arrested, seized their property, tortured and executed them, in order to fill his Treasury. See also "the legend of the Templar's curse" supposedly cursing the Pope and Philip IV that they would both die within the year.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">231: Note the key point here, that the state is competing with the elites for a shrinking economic surplus from the peasant labor force. <b>[It's always curious to me that so many historians simply assume that all state resources are definitionally extracted from the peasantry, when wealth has a highly consistent Pareto or 80-20 type distribution across history, which means the peasantry never has anything to extract in the first place!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">232ff: On the misconception that the Hundred Years' War was what created France's troubles: this is not a full-fledged conflict over the whole period, and in fact by that argument you could argue that there was a "thousand year war" between 1066 and 1815 between France and England! "Contemporaries were astonished by the repeated defeats that mighty France suffered at the hands of relatively puny England." Lack of cohesion of the French military, lots of landless lords looking to get money and loot via warring,</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">235: <b>[Again the history here is getting very far afield and the author would do well and return to his general theme]</b> On the capture of French King John the Good at Poitiers, 1356 AD; this triggered the collapse of the state into "urban revolution, aristocratic rebellion, and peasant uprising, all at once." Interesting discussion here of a technical coup d'etat which happened when representatives of the church and nobility as well as the merchant class ("the Council of Thirty-Six") elected representatives to run Paris while John II was in captivity; they attempted to arrest the chancellor and other financial officers to get a true account of all the funds that had been spent; these officials fled the country then this sort of pseudo-government took over the mint as well as the duty of raising and collecting taxes, and began creating new coinage. [All this is really reminiscent of the John Law controversy under Louis XV in the early 1700s.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">236ff: General collapse of order all over France; violence and counter-violence between classes, the king/dauphin was nearly killed by artisans and tradesmen who marched on the Royal Palace under Etienne Marcel, but he talked his way out of it; there were unpaid soldiers rampaging throughout the countryside, even attacking Pope Innocent VI who was running the papacy from Avignon in those days; also peasant violence etc., total breakdown of cooperation among the entire civilization. <b>[You can get a feel here for what is likely to come in places like Ukraine as it undergoes its collapse right now. And in the next bullet point you can get a sense of how things get very quickly--and violently--put back under control...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: A New Idea of Renaissance: Why Human Conflict Is Like a Forest Fire and an Epidemic</b></div><div dir="auto">239ff: Continuing with the situation in 1300s-era France: The nobles finally start to unify and put down the peasant uprising, <b>"the nobles again demonstrated that a peasant uprising has no chance against a prepared and organized nobility."</b> The author describes an encounter between 120 men-at-arms versus 9,000 peasant insurgents in the town of Meaux, it was a total slaughter, and quickly the peasant rebellions ended; the elites quickly organized with the royalty and state and created a tax/fiscal framework that lasted basically until the French Revolution, again, with most of the tax burden borne by the poor/peasant classes. <b>[Another helpful takeaway for the way things <i>really</i> work when there's a conflict between two regimes: that conflict may be the "ostensible" conflict and there <i>actually may be</i> a physical conflict among ruling elites, but in reality the true conflict is between the classes of these allegedly warring states--and <i>that</i> conflict typically resolves in the favor of the side that is better organized and better armed... and this typically is the elites, with the military and the next 10% of the society supporting them. The more I learn about geopolitics and intra-state conflict, the more I can see that when it really gets down to it, the elites usually "re-unite" against the people. Barring that they escape and retire to leisure outside of that country's borders. Further, it's the monetary/taxation system that really undergirds the power structure it seems: high taxes limit social mobility, ossify class structures, limit the creation of new elites who might threaten the old elites, etc. I think also a cheat code to all this is just get yourself quietly into the top decile (or higher) of your society and do your best to stay there.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">241: Also worth noting that thousands of French nobility were killed off in the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; this had certain interesting effects: there were fewer noble "thugs" to cause trouble by 1360, many were either killed off or got the property of slain relatives; there was a generally held desire for peace and stability; further, the new regular tax scheme enabled the building of a permanent army. <b>[The author doesn't say, but note that looks like now we see a mechanism to dump the burdens of the military onto people <i>other than the nobility</i>, and further to use that standing military to reestablish state power by crushing any uprising anywhere. This is basically the power structure of the modern state right here. Very interesting and rather depressing.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>242: [Interesting to think through this author's concept of "elite overproduction"]:</b> On the idea that there were too many nobles, the author refers to the problem continuing even after all the losses of the nobility due the bloodletting of battle of Crecy and other key battles during the Hundred Years' War; there were still new nobles coming up as their numbers "were replenished by vigorous upward mobility from the ranks of commoners." [This is an absolutely fascinating comment right here. First of all, wouldn't you <i>want </i>this kind of social mobility? You'd be against it only if you assumed that nobles produced nothing and only were extractive, it's basically fixed pie thinking. Isn't "social mobility" a positive? Obviously a permanently calcified class structure is <i>not</i> a good thing. And then just thinking from a dollar and cents standpoint: these people had to pay in order to receive "ennobeling patents" issued by the king, thus they theoretically could be paying tremendous amounts into the state treasury. So, again, how would this be extractive?]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">243: Finally the author is arriving at the central theme of this chapter: the social psychology involved in the cycles of "integrative" and "disintegrative" phases of a country, in this case France, across the decline up to the mid=14th century, the recovery in the late 14th century, followed by another collapse, then a resurgence in the mid-15th century. The author describes internal warfare like an epidemic or a forest fire, getting worse, getting worse... and then finally it burns itself out and people seek stability and peace.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">245: Now we're on to a new topic: the 30 years civil war in France in the early 15th century between the Burgundy faction and King Louis of Orleans. Also Henry V from England took advantage of this internal conflict and invaded in 1415, winning a major battle at Agincourt, and taking territory in Normandy while the forces of Burgundy besieged Paris. What a shitshow France was in these days!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">248ff: The author attempts to explain why the population didn't recover after this early 15th century disintegrative phase until the second half of the 15th century; there was a lack of security across the entire country; there were family feuds, infrastructure was destroyed, brigandage and warring back and forth, ransacking of land, endemic famine, etc., throughout the first half of the 15th century.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">250ff: Here the author talks about the various extinction events for the nobility in France through the 14th and first half of the 15th century: deaths due to various conflicts where tremendous numbers of nobles died at the hands of the British; then a selection event that happened with incomes of estates declining, the weakest estates basically went away, absorbed by the largest estates; owners of the smaller estates "left" the nobility by losing their lands and status. The author gives an example of nine fiefs in the county of Blois, where five remained within the hands of old nobility without interruption, but of the remaining four one was seized by the Duke of Orleans, another was sold to another family and the last two were acquired by new nobles. Another region where from 1313 to 1429 there were 40 fiefs that declined to 18, so there were fewer lords, but the ones that made it had way more land. [Sort of a consolidation across the nobility you could say]. Also interesting statistics that from the early 14th century until the mid 15th century, France's population fell by half, but the number of nobles declined by three quarters.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">255ff: Circa 1450: now England falls into a period of instability, as France "hardens" against its neighbor, reclaims its territory and unifies. Interesting here that England goes through its phases kind of opposite to France; the author also uses this as evidence that "climate change" couldn't have been the cause of these various instabilities because these two countries would have been experiencing integration and disintegration in parallel, not in opposition.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: The Matthew Principle: Why the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer</b></div><div dir="auto">[Also a weak chapter here: the author's central point is that as wealth gets too unequally distributed a state will enter a disintegrative phase.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">262: Discussion of inequality of land ownership, and how it develops; the author verbally describes mathematical models he has created (which sounds rather fixed-pie in their underlying assumptions), eventually arrives at the conclusion that as long as land is scarce, a vast gulf between the rich and poor is a structural element, a feature not a bug of any economic system, and ultimately you end up with "a tiny minority of wealthy landowners and a huge majority of landless proletarians." Unless, says the author, there's some sort of progressive inheritance tax or the abolishing of private property altogether. <b>[Something bugs me about the way the author thinks through this: it's as if there's only farmers and rentiers in his mental model of an economy... and that's it: like a simple two element economy, when obviously there was a whole sophisticated economy going on with all kinds of services, all kinds of commerce and all kinds of ways to produce new wealth, etc. And then to trust the state--the recipient of any inheritance taxes, and of course <i>the literal owner of everything</i> if you abolish private property (!)--to somehow not keep these resources solely for the elites' use... Only a clueless academic could arrive at such a "solution."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">266ff: Extended hypothetical here of two family trajectories across generations. Note that the author draws a pretty straight trajectory for both families in opposite directions, when you would have mean reversion and variance in fortunes <i>from</i> one generation to the next; note also, a fortune just handed to the next generation is often a contraindicator: it produces inheritors without work ethic, hence the saying "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">267: Note also that the Matthew effect was at work among the aristocracy. The really rich got richer. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">270: On the question of why doesn't inequality reach the ultimate extreme where one person owns everything? What drives reductions in inequality like in the United States during the 20th century? During the 14th century, the reduction in population due to the plague and famine years drove a decrease in inequality; the author doesn't really answer this question directly but goes through various historical cycles of increasing and decreasing wealth among the elites across the centuries in England and in France, and then strange sidebar on <i>The Three Musketeers.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Wheels Within Wheels: The Many Declines of the Roman Empire</b></div><div dir="auto">283: Dunking on Edward Gibbon's <i>Decline and Fall</i>; debates on when actually was the collapse of Rome, 1453? 476? Or was it the third century AD, because of all the strife, civil war and barbarian invasions of that era? Or the first century BC when the Republican Rome ended and "empire" Rome began?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>285-6: The author gives us a good page and a half long restatement of his general thesis right here: the idea of asabiya and collective capacity for action; the idea of a meta-ethnic frontier between civilizations which are crucibles within which high-asabiya societies are forged; the collective action leading to territorial expansion but then breeding its own failure as peace brings war and war brings peace; then within those long secular cycles, we see shorter cycles of integrative and disintegrative phases, and fathers-sons-grandsons cycles of violence and peace inside of <i>those</i> cycles, etc. These wheels-within-wheels cycles have different lengths: the asabiya cycle can be centuries to a millennium, secular integrative-disintegrative phases can take centuries (there can be three or four of these cycles during the life cycle of an imperial nation), and then inside of that there will be fathers-and-sons cycles of 40-60 years.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">286ff: The author now maps Rome to his various cycles, citing the first cycle from the 7th century BC up to the 4th century BC and the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390, followed by an integrative cycle until 140 BC, this cycle was a typically long due in part to the Hannibalic/Punic Wars, which were major setbacks for the Romans; also the tremendous long-term success of their expansion (so the integrative phase for the third cycle which ran from 27 BC to AD 180 was also longer than typical). <b>[So far all I'm seeing here is the idea that Rome doesn't really fit the author's time horizons and he really has to stretch them out and/or add epicycles to fit it to his model. And yet the Turchin claims that The Fourth Turning is "procrustean"? First cast the beam out of thine own eye...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">289ff: Various examples of ostentation and wealth in Rome: see Cicero's attack on Chrysogonus, contemporary historians like Livy and Sallust who lectured in their histories about the decadence of 1st century BC aristocracy in Rome, negatively comparing them to the character of Romans before then.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">292ff: A big part of this author's model centers on economic inequality, and in particular conspicuous consumption: he sees it as both a structural and a self-evident driver of disintegrative forces, lessening asabiya in a state. Likewise, see slavery as a component of this inequality: the author considers it highly corrosive. The author goes through an interesting [although I'm not sure how rigorous] argument that the American South under slavery had less municipal life, fewer officials, less public infrastructure. <b>[Unfortunately this doesn't come close to explaining how the South had such high "asabiya" and such collective unity <i>that it was able to hold off a tremendously superior opponent for years longer than anybody thought it could.</i> The author mentions nothing about this aspect of that conflict and this may indicate that the author hasn't really done his due diligence on 19th century American history. Oversights like this can be revealing: maybe the author doesn't know quite as much as he thinks he does in other historical eras... History is a very messy discipline and there is so little that we know.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">295: The Republic-Principate transition in Rome: first signs were slave revolts breaking out all over the Roman world, per the author: "Peasant rebellions rarely succeed in agrarian societies when the elites maintain their unity, and slave revolts in late Republican Rome were not an exception to this rule. A much more dangerous threat to the state arises when the elites become splintered, and certain factions begin to mobilize popular support to be used in their quest for power." See here the reign of Tiberius Simpronius Gracchus, 163-132 BC, who attempted to break up large private estates and distribute that land to landless citizens; this triggered a factional split in the Roman aristocracy, Tiberius was murdered along with 300 of his supporters by the wealthy faction of the elites; then followed a century or more of disequilibrium and civil conflict; then Pompeii vs Caesar etc., which resolved as Rome was established as an empire under Octavian/Augustus in 27 BC. This dictatorship (effectively) was greeted with relief and tremendous public popularity and a broad popular consensus; this was the end of the disintegrative phase of the Republican cycle which had many fathers-and-sons mini-cycles; the author further argues that this internal instability solved the "elite overproduction" problem just like in the 13th and 14th century French and English examples earlier in the book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>301: The author here actually admits "it becomes tedious to read about one secular cycle after another".. I'll say it does.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">301ff: Rome, AD 100: resumption of population growth and a resumption of the Matthew principle/economic inequality all over again; note however from AD 96 to 180 (the five "good" emperors era) was a period of peace and stability and a golden age of the aristocracy; it began to show instability with the Antonine plague in 165 AD with an effect comparable to the Black Death; then "Things unraveled very rapidly in the wake of the epidemic." Germanic tribes invaded, finances collapsed, the denarius was debased again and again (also the legions were not under political control anymore because they couldn't be paid); Marcus Aurelius was able to hold things together for a little while, but then his heir Commodus essentially presided over the destruction and civil war of the regime; thus the "imperiopathosis" of the Roman Nation entered its acute phase; the author argues that AD 268 was when the Roman Empire "ended" as Danubian frontier officers took control of the Empire, producing a string of rulers known as the Illyrian soldier emperors; these included the very able Diocletian, as well as Constantine who moved the capital to Constantinople; these emperors continued to call themselves "Romans" but they were part of a new imperial nation that would become the Byzantine Empire. At this point the Italians/Romans "had clearly lost any remaining asabiya by this point." Rome became atomized, with extreme inequality and lack of solidarity [somewhat reminiscent of today's USA to be honest].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>305: Interesting assertion here on page 305: the author definitively states that the increase in wealth of the aristocracy came at the expense of the commoners. "This increase in the wealth of the elites had to come at the expense of the pauperization of the commoners. Everything we know about the late empire supports this view." [See also my comments on wealth extraction on page 231 above: this does not appear to be borne out by wealth-building in other eras, and, again, it is fascinating to see this as an underlying assumption for so historians throughout so many periods of history, especially when wealth is almost always Pareto distributed to begin with: how can the minority which already holds 80% of the wealth "enrich" itself by taking the 20% that remains? <i>That's not enough to move the needle</i>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">305: At this point barbarians were able to move freely throughout Italy without eliciting any collective response from the native Italians, even though these invading barbarians were outnumbered by orders of magnitude. Note also that the Roman State essentially left and moved to Constantinople, and even the leaders of the western part of the Roman Empire moved their headquarters closer to northern Italy, to Milan, Ravenna and the Apennine mountains (trans-Apennine Italy); this produced a different trajectory in northern Italy than in peninsular Italy which became an asabiya black hole ("to this very day" according to the author, ouch), while northern Italy was the seat of several cohesive medium-sized states across the centuries to come.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part III: Cliodynamics: A New Kind of History</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: War and Peace and Particles: The Science of History</b></div><div dir="auto">311ff: On Tolstoy's view of history, that history is <i>not</i> made by great men, that the science of history can be constructed by integrating the actions of myriads of individuals; this is a concept modern sociologists accept; <b>on Tolstoy's argument that Napoleon at Borodino was deluding himself that he directed anything, in actuality each army fought on its own under officers and soldiers who knew what to do "and orders arriving from Napoleon were outdated or simply wrong."</b> The author actually tests Napoleon's impact using methods developed by military historians, he determine that Napoleon actually was a force multiplier equivalent to adding an extra 30% to the French troops. Interesting.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">316: A defense here of clioynamics from the author. <b>[I have to say that one self-evident problem with this domain is the GIGO problem, also what little "data" that you have from an era is only the (likely tiny) fraction that survived to today, <i>not the actual data</i>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>317-8: Discussion of free will; the author believes we have free will, and he uses suicide as an interesting example of "the ultimate act of free will" of an individual; and yet reasonably he also argues that we can predict accurately the number of suicides in a large country, and we also can predict changes in that rate due to various factors. Thus this is "an example of how an exercise of free choice at the micro level can have a vanishingly small effect at the macro level."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">322ff: Discussion of Trevor Dupuy and his book <i>Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat;</i> On the cliodynamic-type measures Dupuy uses to estimate battle performance of the military, the ratio of combat powers, the ratio of force strengths and the ratio of modifying factors like weather or fatigue; also an unknown which is the ratio of combat efficiencies. Note that in World War II German troops had far higher combat efficiencies than British and American troops. The next chapter asks if we can measure something like "combat efficiency" in the sense of non-military aspects of society like collective action.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: The Bowling Alley in History: Measuring the Decline of Social Capital</b></div><div dir="auto">325ff: Discussion of Robert Putnam and his 1993 book <i>Making Democracy work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy</i>; on Putnam's concept of "social capital" (which the author calls asabiya) for modern democratic societies; Putnam did research on 1970s Italy when its political system was reformed, delegating unprecedented powers and resources to new regional governments; this offered sort of "political laboratory" where we could compare how well each government operates, comparing differences which should be due to the political culture of each region. <b>[Okay, I see now why the author calls southern Italy "an asabiya black hole," this guy Putnam's research showed that northern Italy had much more social capital and southern Italy had much less];</b> see also Edward Banfield and his book <i>The Moral Basis of the Backward Society</i>, analyzing a southern Italian village in the 1950s and 60s, "amoral familism"; <b>[It's interesting to see how these narratives about southern Italy would be easily and widely insta-accepted by centralized state proponents, you can find all kinds of reasons why a society based on a family or extended family unit size would be a dyscivic failure, implicitly suggesting the state should therefore step in and "fix" things; very very interesting]</b>; the author cites the tremendous difference in wealth and industrialization between the north and south of Italy, people look at the country in aggregate and see the average, so it looks like Italy is in the middle of the pack in Europe; but in reality the northern regions are very high-ranking. "Yet only a century ago there was practically no wealth differential between the north and south."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">328-9: Strangely unrigorous side-discussion here of modern corporations, tying in ideas from Francis Fukuyama's (now deeply discredited) books that corporations require a high-trust society like the Italian north in order to function well, and they cannot function well in low-trust regions like the Italian south; <b>[This is kind of a strange adaptation of this idea to a domain that doesn't really appear to support it.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">330ff: On the north-south divide in Italy, according to the author, this divide arose a millennium ago in the Roman Empire: after the collapse, northern Italy was settled by Germanic immigrants from high-trust societies, whereas there was no attempt at state building in the south and also no meta-ethnic frontier in the south like the North had. <b>"Two or three centuries on a very intense meta-ethnic frontier seems to be the minimum time needed to nurture high asabiya."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">331ff: On David Hackett Fisher's book <i>The Great Wave,</i> which traces four secular waves of European history in the last millennium;</div><div dir="auto">1) The High Middle Ages (an integrative phase), the 14th century crisis (a disintegrative phase); </div><div dir="auto">2) The Renaissance (integrative) followed by the 17th century crisis (disintegrative)</div><div dir="auto">3) The Enlightenment (integrative), followed by the age of revolution (disintegrative)--he must mean here the mid-1800s revolution period throughout Europe</div><div dir="auto">4) Now: the fourth wave is what we are living through now, starting with an integrative phase beginning with the Victorian era in the second half of the 19th century, leading up to the first half of the 20th century, followed by a disintegrative phase from 1960 onwards. </div><div dir="auto">The author also cites harsh criticism of Fisher's idea from <b>[infamous contraindicator]</b> Paul Krugman; the author goes through some of his own criticisms of Fisher's work as well <b>[including a false example: Turchin talks about the rising trend in crime since 1960 when there's been a substantial <i>decline</i> in crime since the 1970s all across the Western world].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">334-5: The author concludes the chapter with a discussion of Robert Putnam's book <i>Bowling Alone</i> and claims it indicates a decline in asabiya in the USA.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: The End of Empire? How the Mobile Phone Is Changing Cliodynamics</b></div><div dir="auto">337ff: On various discussions of "the end of empires" from the end of World War I where the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires collapsed, to the 1960s where the colonial empires of Western Europe collapsed, and to the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed; of course leading to a discussion of whether the United States today is in fact an empire <b>[it self-evidently is]</b>. The author defines an empire as "a large multi-ethnic territorial state with complex power structure." Also you can have a democratically governed empire: see the Athenian Empire as well as the British Empire, and for at least some of its history, the Roman Empire.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">339ff: "American asabiya might be on a decline, if recent trends in social capital are good indicators, but the U.S. still has an abundance when compared to other large contemporary countries." <b>[The author cites 9/11 as an example of something that "united" the USA, but I think we could just as easily argue that 9/11 was a very brief outlier example that quickly broke down into total disunity over the USA's irrational military response to the attacks. Honestly the USA is looking more and more like the author's negative descriptions of southern Italy than anything else]</b>; the author also writes about American integrative ideology, espousing liberty, democracy and the rule of law, and likening it to how the Byzantines had Orthodox Christianity, the Arabs had Islam, the Soviets had Marxism-Leninism... [I'm not sure to what extent these parallels work however.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">341ff: The EU as a type of empire, but not a very good example; whereas China "fits the definition of empire perfectly" according to this author, citing conquest of Tibet, the suppression of the Uighurs, regaining Hong Kong, bringing Taiwan into the fold, and extending economic influence all over the globe. On the former Soviet empire: Russia as a potential empire that's down but "not yet out" according to the author. Also an interesting discussion here of Russia and its conflict with Chechnya: the Russians basically asked Chechnya to go away and leave them alone, but then Chechnya devolved into lawlessness, began raiding other parts of the Russian Federation, then after a series of terrorist acts in Russia--including blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow--Russia decided enough was enough and basically reduced Chechnya to rubble, and fully incorporated it back under Moscow's control. <b>[We can see here a fascinating example of how Russia works: they put up with all kinds of crap until they don't... and now, interestingly, Chechnya is sending volunteer soldiers to fight for Russia against Ukraine.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>345: Very interesting quote here. "Here then is why I consider Chechnya such an important indicator of the future trajectory of the Russian state--and an empirical test of the asabiya theory. If the Russians succeed in reincorporating the Chechens within the Russian Federation, my guess is that Russia will regain its status as world empire. If not, and a Caucasian caliphate expands to the Middle Volga, it will most likely mean the end of Russia as we know it." [Note that this book was written in 2006: by this time Russia had already subdued Chechnya militarily, and in 2017 the conflict was ended and Chechnya remains part of Russia.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">346ff: Anecdote here about a young jihadi from Yemen who was enraged by American behavior in the Middle East and with the encouragement of his wife went to war to fight in Fallujah, Iraq; he ultimately died in a suicide mission. This is the author's introduction to the meta-ethnic frontier of Islam with the West, with Orthodox Christianity, and also with Hindu and Sinic civilizations. Also on Jewish-Israeli power as an extension of American imperialism--at least as seen by the Muslim world; on the creation of a distinct Palestinian identity where there was none prior as "the asabiya of Palestinians has increased enormously." [Holy cow the if author could have known then what is happening right now with Israel's ongoing invasion of Palestine...]; On the Arab world's lack of unity during several conflicts with Israel in 1947-48, the 1960s and 1970s, the author notes that this is changing, citing how in 2000, Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon against Shiite and Hezbollah fighters.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">349ff: On how the meta-ethnic frontier theory predicts that Western intrusion in the Middle East will produce a counter-response, the author thinks possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate. The author also notes that two centuries passed from the First Crusade to the end of the Crusades in 1291 when the Crusaders were expelled; note also that modern western pressure on Islamic societies of the Middle East dates back to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>350ff: On the book <i>Pattern and Repertoire in History</i> by Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme, suggesting that human societies have memories [what a super interesting idea!], and when challenged they reach into their collective memories for a response that worked before in similar situations and then adapt it to the challenge today;</b> see for example repetitions of civilizational behavior in France across the centuries from the 14th to the 18th century. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">351ff: Discussion about media across the centuries, pre-industrial societies might have the king's face on a coin as a visual image, or a national or multinational church could instruct the priesthood to deliver sermons on certain topics, etc.; with modern media and then the internet as mediating force, lessening the media powers of the state: the author cites the Dan Rather Air National Guard hoax, which was exposed by bloggers; the author sees blogging and the modern media world as a heterarchy versus a hierarchy where information flows back and forth between nodes rather than solely from a center. On cell phones as the author says "will probably have the greatest impact on social dynamics." The author also cites the "smart mob" that toppled the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 2001. <b>[It is interesting (and quite depressing) to place these non-predictive thoughts from 2006 next to the current year when we now know that governments infiltrated and heavily censored social media throughout the pandemic and pandemic response period.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Philip Ball: <i>Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another</i></div><div dir="auto">David Christian: <i>A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia</i> </div><div dir="auto">William McNeil: <i>Plagues and Peoples</i></div><div dir="auto">William McNeil: <i>The Rise of the West</i></div><div dir="auto">N.M. Karamzin: <i>History of the Russian State</i> (trans. Soloviev)</div><div dir="auto">N.V. Riazanocsky: <i>A History of Russia</i></div><div dir="auto">R. Grousset: <i>The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia</i></div><div dir="auto">P.S. Wells: <i>The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Armenius, and the Slaughter Of Legions In the Teutoburg Forest</i></div><div dir="auto">H. Wolfram: <i>The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples</i></div><div dir="auto">Samuel P. Huntington: <i>The Clash of Civilizations</i></div><div dir="auto">***Warren Treadgold: <i>A History of the Byzantine State and Society</i></div><div dir="auto">Ramsey MacMullen: <i>Corruption and Decline of Rome</i></div><div dir="auto">F.M. Donner: <i>The Early Islamic Conquests</i></div><div dir="auto">T.J. Cornell: <i>The Beginnings of Rome: From the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars</i></div><div dir="auto">Polybius: <i>The Histories</i></div><div dir="auto">James Powers: <i>A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000-1284</i></div><div dir="auto">Henry Kamen: Empire: <i>How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763</i></div><div dir="auto">***Eleanor Searle: <i>Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066</i></div><div dir="auto">***Jonathan Sumption: <i>The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle</i> </div><div dir="auto">Trevor N. Dupuy: <i>Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat</i></div><div dir="auto">Edward Banfield: <i>The Moral Basis of the Backward Society</i></div><div dir="auto">David Hackett Fischer: <i>The Great Wave</i></div><div dir="auto">***Alexander Pushkin: <i>The Prisoner of Caucuses</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-49244199813848751642024-03-04T05:56:00.000-08:002024-03-04T06:11:42.752-08:00Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon [Commissario Brunetti #1] [review short: no spoilers]<div style="text-align: left;">A famous opera conductor with an awful secret is murdered, poisoned with cyanide, during intermission at the Venice opera. This is the first of the "Commissario Brunetti" series, and it's quite a competent mystery. The author has a knack for revealing aspects of her characters gradually and naturally over the course of the narrative, and readers get a fun mini-course in Italian cultural nuances as they read.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's good enough that you'll want to read the next.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Finally, I'll mention one beautiful and mournful scene from this novel that stands out: Chapter 14, where Inspector Brunetti visits a dark, forgotten part of Venice to interview a very old, once-famous opera singer in her home. You can feel the loneliness right through the pages, it's so well done.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* On what it's like living in a city like Venice that's slowly but surely evolving into a sort of outdoor museum for tourists and becoming less and less a place for actual Italians to live. <br /><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">* <i>"Brunetti closed his notebook, in which he had done no more than scribble the American's last name, as if to capture the full horror of a word composed of five consonants."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Brunetti's wife Paola always chooses a suspect at the beginning of any of his investigations; Brunetti considers it both charming and naive as his wife tends to pick the "too obvious" suspect, which is almost always the wrong suspect. <i>Almost</i> always.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "Not for the first time in his career, Brunetti reflected upon the possible advantage of censorship of the press. In the past, the German people had got along very well with a government that demanded it, and the American government seemed to fare similarly well with a population that wanted it."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On the thin layer of corruption underlying everything: characters will comment on things like how the corruption in Venice, such as it is, is still way less than in Sicily; or see for example another scene where Inspector Brunetti, out of sheer curiosity, directly asks a character how in the world she was able to get a permit to install skylights in her top floor apartment: she answers, bluntly, "I bribed the inspector," and then tells him the precise amount!</div><div dir="auto"></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-11497462949433117852024-02-28T16:56:00.000-08:002024-03-04T12:08:56.364-08:00Radical By Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace by James T. Costa<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Excruciatingly detailed biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th century naturalist who <i>should</i> be a household name. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Everyone knows about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, yet almost nobody knows that Wallace <i>scooped</i> Darwin. Darwin of course had been working on the idea for years, but it was Wallace who published first. The two men were credited as co-discoverers, in what appears suspiciously like a 19th century version of participation trophies.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">But if Wallace was first, why is he barely known at all? </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Now this question is extremely interesting, and it teaches us that it isn't just <i>modern</i> scientists who exclude and marginalize people for wrongthink and for failing to "support the current thing." Old school 19th century scientists did it too! Nobody knows who Wallace is <i>today</i> because he didn't tow the line of the fashionable scientific narratives of <i>his</i> day. He was a dissident thinker, and the scientific establishment of the 1800s didn't like it. There is nothing new under the sun.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">And yet Wallace was among the most important scientists of the 19th century, a genuine polymath, publishing important work across an astoundingly broad range of domains: biology, geology, ornithology, entomology, botany, ethnology, linguistics, anthropology and paleontology. Contrast this with the typically hyperspecialized modern scientist, doing research in some narrow sub-sub-sub specialty.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">What, then, were Wallace's alleged heresies? There were quite a few: he was a socialist, a utopianist, a spiritualist, he researched (and even practiced) hypnosis. He had what were seen as odd spiritual beliefs and some of his political beliefs were <i>really</i> out there: like the crazy, ludicrous, totally unacceptable idea that women should have the right to vote. Wrongthink like this was beyond the pale for the scientific and political establishment of his time.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">The richest irony of all, however, is this: if you look at Wallace's belief sets, he would mesh quite well with political fashion today. He'd get funding for whatever her wanted! If our modern scientific elites could really look downfield, they would cancel Darwin and rehabilitate Wallace.</div></div><div dir="auto"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDCWUtDI9EJFf-S7FI1wJcej1d290FNs9nP5fEh5h1OUWxDE8uChobFim0L7ANByQffmGSTUHF6VLo2EDNm-OnoIxAK0zxnKxOkek1llqBUYLCFhTSQL-2HDkZxFGpItdbmK9Ozbh2T0FBPPX2GRbUtIfWdzaIJ_C2ovCLFAwD0ZL5jelF61UBiUQbGb7N/s597/Screenshot%202024-02-28%206.08.08%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="382" data-original-width="597" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDCWUtDI9EJFf-S7FI1wJcej1d290FNs9nP5fEh5h1OUWxDE8uChobFim0L7ANByQffmGSTUHF6VLo2EDNm-OnoIxAK0zxnKxOkek1llqBUYLCFhTSQL-2HDkZxFGpItdbmK9Ozbh2T0FBPPX2GRbUtIfWdzaIJ_C2ovCLFAwD0ZL5jelF61UBiUQbGb7N/w640-h410/Screenshot%202024-02-28%206.08.08%20PM.png" width="640" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: center;"><i>Not quite as true as I thought, apparently</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i><br /></i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Radical By Nature</i> has one primary weakness:<i> it is too goddamn long</i>. You will learn everything--and I mean <i>everything</i>--about this guy. You'll learn the name of every single bug he finds, and the names of all the bugs he doesn't find. You will learn all the places he goes to to do his research, and all the places he doesn't. You can't help but sense author James T. Costa's obvious affection for his subject, but you also can't help but think of Blaise Pascal's famous saying "if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Finally, a few brief thoughts on biography itself. Obviously one way to tell the story of a person's life is to just tell it, from beginning to end. This is how our author handles things, although he also attempts to tie in certain general themes to help lug the reader along. But the best biographies don't lug a reader longitudinally across the subject's life. Instead, they find a way to structure the story arc so that it grips and propels the reader. See for example <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/04/napoleon-by-emil-ludwig.html" target="_blank">Emil Ludwig's famous, romantic biography of Napoleon</a>, or <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/03/tamerlane-by-harold-lamb.html" target="_blank">Harold Lamb's short and tight bio of Tamerlane</a>. There are other more recent examples: David McCullough's moving biography of Harry Truman (yes, it actually was moving), and finally, <i>Einstein Defiant</i>, Edmund Blair Bolles' striking biography of Albert Einstein, which reads like a Nietzschean narrative and transfixes the reader throughout. I write this merely to illustrate the often stark contrast between great biographies that truly grip the reader and workmanlike biographies that don't.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Once again, a friendly warning: don't read any further. What follows are just my notes to the text.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes: </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface: Multitudinous</b></div><div dir="auto">1) 2013 was the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death, note that some dozen books have come out about him over the past few decades. The author says here that his goal is to not do a contextual analysis or critical biography of Russell's works or his life but rather to "tell a good story" of "this remarkable individual's life." <b>[I think we can agree he tells <i>a long and very detailed</i> story of his life.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2) On the idea that Wallace didn't just focus on evolution which was Darwin's near-total focus. Instead Wallace pursued myriad scientific interests, social and political issues, even spiritualism. [Note that the author celebrates him for his "social justice" <b>and a modern reader can't help but think: now that his once-heretical views are coming into fashion with today's establishment, maybe it's time to "rehabilitate" him and "cancel" Darwin! Wallace was contra-narrative in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but now he's right back in vogue.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: A Happy but Downwardly Mobile Family</b></div><div dir="auto">3) Alfred Russel Wallace's father Thomas Wallace: a bit of a socialite, he qualified as a solicitor but never practiced; gets into a bunch of disastrous business ventures; the family then had to move to rural South Wales, "where living was as cheap as possible."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4) ARW is an eclectic reader, learns most of his stuff outside of school.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5) The family has yet another financial disaster, his mother's brother-in-law blew the family money in a speculative building project in London; the family lost most of their income and assets; had to move around a lot for a while; Alfred gets pulled from school and sent to apprentice with his brother John as a carpenter/sawyer at age 14. It turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6) Ironically at that time, in 1837, Darwin was living about a mile away from them in Wales.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Taking Measure in the Borderlands</b></div><div dir="auto">7) ARW goes to live with his brother John, who was working as a carpenter's apprentice, this to help the family save money until Alfred can join his older brother William to apprentice as a surveyor. He works on odds jobs and hangs around in the carpentry shop, learning a ton. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">8) On Robert Owen, socialist/utopianism, who ARW met when he was young; Owen founded a cotton mill offering workers labor rights, a school, eight-hour workdays, etc., and it survived until 1968; he also funded an even more scaled-up version of this type of enterprise in the USA on the Wabash River, called "New Harmony"; the spread of Owenism or "Owenite free thought societies" flourished across London from the 1830s to the 1860s; this was a sort of proto-socialism essentially. "Owen's influence on Wallace cannot be overstated."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9) Wallace comes into contact with Thomas Paine's book <i>Age of Reason</i>, criticizing corruption of the established churches, advancing deistic arguments.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10) Another irony: Wallace has a lot of surveying work to do as he begins his apprenticeship to a surveyor in Bedfordshire, but it is for the "enclosure movement" as well as land to be used for the commutation of tithes, these were policies that favored elites at the expense of everyone else. Per the author this made Wallace "an accessory to a crime, as he later saw it." On the acceleration of land enclosure during the 17th and 18th centuries after the 1773 "Inclosure Act" which practically made it national policy to fence in all common field lands.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11) On tithe rites and the commutation of tithes: people working the land would pay an annual rent of 1/10 of the production of crops, livestock, wool, fish, honey, whatever, originally this was paid to the church but over time as the monasteries faded from the scene it was paid to aristocratic landowners; the "commutation" turned these in-kind tithes into cash payments, basically a rent payment rather than sharecropping; </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12) The surveying work helped him sharpen his skills of observation in the natural world.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13) He tries smoking like his older brother, overdoes it, gets a terrible headache and vomits... and was cured forever from any desire to smoke from then on.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>14) [Interesting epistemic insight here as the author paraphrases geologist Charles Lyell]: "We need to perceive pattern to try to infer process since we cannot ask questions about what we do not even notice." This is a really good way to think about navigating any systems you can't actually see (examples would be things like like particle physics, investing, or even 5th generation warfare conducted in the modern era), any kind of power structures that are not directly visible but yet we can infer things about the system via observation of secondary effects, through experiment, via hypothesis testing, etc ...this is a really useful way to expand beyond the domain of geology to any domain.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">15) Around the age of 19-20, in 1841-1843, ARW had more time between surveying jobs and was left to study topics on his own, not just geology but also astronomy, botany, etc. His brother and sister consider him to be kind of a slacker who wastes money on expensive books. Wallace also starts to think bigger too, dreaming about traveling to exotic places like Guyana for example.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16) He's anti-inspired by a local botanist "of some repute" who gave such a boring lecture that he wanted to try and do something better...!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">17) 1843 Wallace's father dies age 72, and the family's finances get much worse; the family disperses: Wallace's mother moves into a housekeeping job for a well-off family, his sister Fanny goes to the US to teach in Montpelier Springs, Georgia, the brothers spread to different apprentice-type jobs, the surveying business gets slow enough by the end of the enclosure movement that his brother William has to lay Wallace off.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Beetling and Big Questions</b></div><div dir="auto">18) Parenthetical story here about how Wallace "became deathly ill with a lung infection after falling into a bog" and was prescribed leeches by his doctor.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19) 1844: Wallace he gets a job teaching at the Collegiate School in the town of Leicester; he continues learning, taking math instruction from the headmaster--although calculus completely stymies him and he learns he is not a math guy! Wallace has experiences with mesmerism/hypnotism and finds he can successfully hypnotize some of his students.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">20) Tossed-off sentence here about Bradgate being the birthplace of Lady Jane Grey (Bradgate Park was where Wallace would take his students for local rambles in the Leicestershire countryside)... <b>I thank the author for sending me down a rabbit hole of learning about Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days Queen," executed at age 17.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">21) Wallace discovers a new obsession: beetles; there are as many beetle species in the UK as all other animal species combined; some 4,100 species of 100 families recorded in the UK.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22) Wallace is electrified by reading Alexander von Humboldt's book <i>Personal Narrative</i> which describes the great naturalist's travels in South America from 1799-1804. He's also influenced by Malthus and his book <i>Principles of Population</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23) Just as Wallace is starting to get settled in and very much enjoying his work teaching at the school, his brother William suddenly dies, likely from pneumonia; Wallace sorts out his brother's affairs and decides to start his own surveying business, also expanding to include basic architecture, construction and engineering; he convinces his other brother John to join him; they have some success in 1845-1846 because of the railroad boom, the success here allowed the family to reunite.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>24) On the anonymous publication in 1844 of (the then-anonymous) book <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/vestigesofnatura1860cham/page/n9/mode/2up" target="_blank">Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation</a></i>, which first talked about "transmutation" the general term then for "evolution" or "species change." This idea had been around for centuries, most recently in Lamarkian theory, and it was roundly rejected in those days because of its existential threat to religion and "values." On the idea of creation formed by "natural laws which are extensions of his [God's] will." The book "had a seismic effect on Wallace."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Paradise Gained...</b></div><div dir="auto">25) Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates hatch a scheme to go to South America, inspired in part by entomologist William Edwards' <i>A Voyage up the River Amazon</i>. They got advice from other important entomologists at the British Museum, even from Edwards himself; they begin the trip when Wallace is 25 and Bates is 23 <b>[jeez, at that age I was still figuring out what the heck to do with my life]</b>. They obtain funding, letters of introduction, all kinds of help. People would also pay them for interesting or rare bugs and butterflies that they might collect. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">26) They collect all kinds of bugs, birds and plants to send back to England; they learn that ants can devour their samples, etc. Wallace sure bungles things sometimes too: he loses his glasses while trying to escape wasps; he grabs an (assumed dead) alligator by the leg and nearly swamps their boat; he picks up his gun by the muzzle, it fires and blows off part of his hand...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27) Bates and Wallace also split up during the trip, possibly quarreling, they hardly mention each other in later tellings of their adventure, although they remained friends the rest of their lives. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>28) Really cool drawing here of the click beetle, bioluminescent enough that you can read by it in the dark. (!)</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkFInfb3USV4BBT5Tcj7E6y-9q08w8Uya0GuOsYnJC7deg1LlzJkH6gsF3O_J72p6Y2mRff8CJ7iyRNPNKtse4AVYCSBaEOY2bPyuzQJJ_wgFDJk1E3kQVdcuU6M5Ls0d-ISKMGLrMTjr2LYaPOix4Oc-2uvSgEQW2Rld6WUBn4t9rcbcQSxFpYQfriJz/s3935/IMG_20240204_153154016.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3072" data-original-width="3935" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKkFInfb3USV4BBT5Tcj7E6y-9q08w8Uya0GuOsYnJC7deg1LlzJkH6gsF3O_J72p6Y2mRff8CJ7iyRNPNKtse4AVYCSBaEOY2bPyuzQJJ_wgFDJk1E3kQVdcuU6M5Ls0d-ISKMGLrMTjr2LYaPOix4Oc-2uvSgEQW2Rld6WUBn4t9rcbcQSxFpYQfriJz/w640-h500/IMG_20240204_153154016.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">29) His brother Edward joins him, his other brother goes to California to be a forty-niner.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>30) Note the discussions here of the Cabanagem: the extensive and destructive and depopulating ethnic riots that happened among the various peoples throughout Brazil; savage, genocidal violence among <i>caboclos</i> (mixed indigenous/European people) <i>pardos</i> (tri- or multiracial indigenous-European-African), other indigenous peoples, and whites. Many of the villages and towns that Wallace visited, years afterward, were still nearly or in some cases totally depopulated, long after these conflicts.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">31) Wallace plans a ginormous voyage up the Rio Negro all the way to Venezuela, to places that no white settler had ever been.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: ...And Paradise Lost</b></div><div dir="auto">32) Wallace's brother Edward takes ill with yellow fever, around the time he begins his huge voyage. Wallace doesn't know that he'll never see his brother alive again.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">33) Wallace also starts to "go native" a bit here, he begins to sour on modern life; he makes many comparisons between life in Brazil and finds his own civilization wanting in many ways, compares the indigenous peoples' simple garments versus the ill-fitting and suffocating garments of his "modern" culture, cites the happiness of the people compared to his own, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">34) Wallace continues further and further upriver, visiting various <i>malocas</i> or longhouses of various Amazonian peoples; constantly taking notes, making sketches and drawings of plants, people, longhouses, collecting specimens, even doing mapmaking and surveying with a sextant and compass; he learns his guide is involved in human slave trafficking.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">35) Wallace contracts malaria, becomes extremely ill and nearly dies from it; he's forced to remain in the Amazon region for some two and a half months, weak and emaciated; he begins to recover and returns to the coastal region, then leaves for home after four years in Brazil, he's now 29 years old.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Down But Not Out</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>36) [This part of the story is incredible, a near-catastrophe]</b> There's a catastrophic fire onboard the ship returning him home; Wallace loses nearly everything he brought with him, most of his papers, sketches and drawings (fortunately Wallace had already made several shipments back to England of bugs, bird and plants he had collected); the crew has to get into a couple of lifeboats that were barely seaworthy and they nearly died of thirst out on the open ocean; luckily they were rescued by another ship after ten days lost at sea. And then, <i>that</i> ship actually ran into a major storm on the way to London and barely made it home. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">37) He didn't go to see his mother when he first reached land; Stevens, Wallace's agent got him some fresh clothes and fed him for a week first: "he was in too frightful a state in his weak and emaciated condition to see his own mother and sister."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38) Incalculable loss of his things on the ship: notes, records, drawings, observations, hundreds of new species, all of which would have made him wealthy and made his scientific reputation; he nearly lost his own life (more than once), he lost his brother, and now he lost most of his stuff from his huge research trip. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">39) He starts making the rounds of the zoology, biology and geographical societies in England, giving talks, he writes certain papers that were well-received, including a paper about separation barriers between species leading to the concept of "speciation by isolation" or "allopatric speciation" as it later came to be called in evolutionary theory. Also he notes convergences of certain traits in separate species as well as other interesting, noteworthy evolutionary phenomena.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">40) He publishes a book on palm trees and another book which is a travel narrative.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">41) Against his better judgment he decides to go on <i>another</i> gigantic trip, this one to the far East; he's now 31 years old and plans to head to Singapore via a roundabout journey through Egypt, then overland to the Red Sea.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: Sarawak and the Law</b></div><div dir="auto">42) Wallace arrives to Singapore, then goes northwest to Malacca; also interesting that he notes the evolution of the Portuguese language this far away from Portugal.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43) He connects up with Sir James Brooke who had a relationship helping protect the sultan of Brunei, Brooke was rewarded with the governorship of Sarawak, then later named hereditary raja after helping to restore the sultan back to his throne; also given a knighthood in England because he arranged for the sultan to cede the island of Labuan to England; all kinds of scientific debates in Brooke's "salon"; Wallace spent an entire rainy season with him, to the benefit of science.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44) Sidebar here on Darwin and his epiphany in 1837 about species change; note that Darwin wrote out a private essay containing his thinking on evolution and sealed it, instructing his wife to publish immediately should he unexpectedly die; in the meantime he was steadily amassing data to back up his claims, and sharing his views only with his trusted friend the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was a transmutation convert since reading <i>Vestiges</i> in 1845.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45) Another sidebar here on Wallace and how he made various intriguing comments in his personal scientific notebooks about the puzzle pieces leading up to his arrival at his theory of evolution. The author argues that this period Wallace spent in Borneo was a period of "synthesis" to put all his ideas together. "The result was a tour de force, and he quickly composed a paper 'on the law which has regulated the introduction of new species.' <b>This paper contained The so-called Sarawak Law: "The following law may be deduced from these facts: every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species."</b> The inference here is that it is derived from a <i>pre-existing</i> species, thus you can arrive at evolutionary lineages that branch which makes sense of classification, geographical distribution, comparative anatomy, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46) He sent the paper back home to Stevens his agent, it was published in 1855, and seen as a criticism of Lyell, who was sufficiently "shaken" that he started a new notebook on the "species question" which began with a detailed summary of Wallace's paper.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">47) Wallace then decides to head inland into Borneo. Interesting blurb here where Wallace pays a penny per insect to local workmen, while he probably sold these to collectors for a huge profit back home. Also notable that in a particular one square mile area in Simunjan on Borneo he collected more than a thousand species (mostly insects presumably).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48) Wallace of course hunts orangutans here as well; the author has a discussion here about differing standards in modernity about capturing/killing animals for study, particularly primates. Wallace also kills a female without realizing it had a nursing baby; he attempts to raise the infant at home without success.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49) Wallace experiences the durian fruit for the first time, and even writes a paper on it, introducing it to Europe; he also writes various speculations on the different ethnic groups in Borneo, thinking about geographical distribution and considering these peoples as well as plants and animals in the region in the context of "descent and branching"; this leads him to infer that the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia were once a closely connected or even perhaps a uniform body of land, based on shared flora and fauna similarities across the islands.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>50) Back to Wallace's Sarawak Law paper: Lyell discussed Wallaces paper with Darwin, and then Darwin revealed his theory of transmutation by natural selection to Lyell, astounding Lyell; with Lyell "clearly seeing the implications of Wallace's paper, soon urged his friend to publish his theory immediately."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Crossing the Line(s)</b></div><div dir="auto">51) Interesting side comment here on the clockwork administrative system of the Dutch colonial system, descended from the Dutch East India company (although it had been defunct by over half a century by then), but the remaining colonial administrative systems handled mail, as well as other things that really aided the work of naturalists like Wallace. Note also a footnote here where the author writes: "There is some irony in Wallace benefiting from and supporting the Dutch colonial apparatus that the VOVC [Dutch East India Company] established while deploring the capitalist system it was based on."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">52) Wallace moves on to Bali and the surrounding region, this is around 1856. Discussion here about volcanic, seismic and tectonic activity in the region, and how various naturalists were trying to infer movement of the seabed, rising and sinking of different strata of rocks, basically trying to understand why you might see unusual geological phenomena like coastal uplift; likewise, Darwin wrote about seafloor uplift due to the 1835 earthquake in Concepcion, Chile, where the sea bed was raised, killing all the then-exposed marine life.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">53) Paragraphs of <i>extensive</i> lists of the various birds found on a given island, or given place; the author notes that Wallace found two nearby islands, Bali and Lombok, which were only 15 miles apart, with many environmental and geological similarities but <i>radically</i> different fauna; this was in conflict with Buffon's Law [Comte de Buffon was a French polymath from the 18th century] which held that environmentally similar regions should have the same types of organisms with some differences. But in this case, however, Wallace found two essentially identical islands side by side with totally different birds and none of the expected Buffon Law-type similarities.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54) Amusing blurb here about macassar oil, this is referring to the trading port town of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi, macassar oil refers to a hair oil that was extremely popular in the late 18th century, to the point where it was mentioned in Lewis Carroll's <i>Through the Looking Glass</i> as well as mocked in Lord Byron's poem <i>Don Juan</i>; maybe we can think of it as the Jheri Curl of 1700s England...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55) On this island few of the people had ever seen white men, they tended to run away, children would scream in terror; Wallace was treated as a sort of strange and terrible monster which depressed him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">56) Sidebar here on the heavy enslavement of the Timor people (both Dutch and Portuguese traders would enslave them) and how Wallace, although he was not favorable towards slavery, did not protest it openly.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57) Journey to the Aru islands; noting the striking ethnic differences between Malay people and the Papuan people. Also on the debate between polygenist anthropologists and monogenist anthropologists: polygenists thought that humans races were separate and distinct entities (like not quite different species), this of course helped justify slavery of certain races; whereas monogenists saw humans as more of a "we are all one" kind of species, that human diversity was simply variants of a single species.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">58) Hunting birds of paradise with the people of Papua on Aru Island. Wallace was the first Westerner who had ever seen these birds in the wild, watched their courtship rituals etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59) The author calls out Wallace for considering the Papuan people fairly inferior: "barely human."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>60) While in the far East he gets a letter from Darwin, "I can plainly see that we have thought much alike & to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">61) Wallace is setting out to prove that "varieties" are no different from species; they are based on the same process and are but intermediate steps.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">62) Also by examining the various correspondence among these naturalists (Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, Blyth, etc.) you can see who was further along on what theory at what time.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: Eureka: Wallace Triumphant</b></div><div dir="auto">63) Wallace notes that Borneo and New Guinea have nearly identical climates but significantly different fauna, while at the same time New Guinea and Australia have significantly different climates <i>but virtually identical fauna</i>. This is the existential threat to Lyell's anti-transmutation view. <b>[Essentially Wallace was doing in the far East Darwin was doing in the Galapagos and in South America]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">64) Exploring plant selection: grasses adapt to an area quickly and can prevent trees from getting a foothold, a type of competition dynamic among plants for capturing and holding ground.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">65) <b>[Wallace fleshing out other aspects of natural selection to arrive at a complete theory that completely scooped Darwin]</b> Wallace wrote later how aspects of this idea came to him while he was in a malarial fit; he was thinking of Malthusian "checks" on population, and concluding that must hold true for animals too. <b>"There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest... I thought out almost the whole of the theory, and in the same evening I sketched the draft of my paper, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it out in full, and sent it by the next post to Mr Darwin."</b> This was February 1858, Wallace was only 35. (!) Our biographer writes "It was a stupendous insight!" The paper was ultimately titled "On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type: a reply to Sir Charles Lyell."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>66) Darwin is "staggered" by this paper, Wallace beat him to the punch. Darwin writes to Lyell, "I never saw a more striking coincidence... So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed... Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>67) Note how we have a textbook example of "scientific elites" from that era--Darwin, Lyell and Hooker--who decided to present Wallace's essay back home in England, but also along with some of Darwin's private writings... and to present Darwin's material first.</b> Wallace was of course in New Guinea at this time and was totally out of pocket and couldn't do anything about this. Also note that Darwin in these same days lost his infant son to scarlet fever and was despondent over it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">68) Wallace is also sick during his entire trip to New Guinea: he has ulcers in his foot and ankle, a weird inflammation of his mouth and gums, and then one of his assistants dies of dysentery.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">69) Wallace on trying to connect the Papuan and Malay peoples somehow. Note also that <i>all</i> of this natural selection and transmutation research really derives from the famous anonymous work <i>Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation</i>, a piece of genuine scientific samizdat literature that scandalized a lot of scientists as early as 1845, more than a decade earlier; this book introduced many controversial views that would be later borne out by Wallace and Darwin: for example, it posited that humanity had a single origin, and that it could be traced by looking at lines of migration, and that you could draw human heritage back to related species like primates.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">70) Fascinating to think how you can send out a paper back home and then several months later (!) get a letter from Darwin himself in response with what happened... <b>Wallace takes the high road and seems actually happy with the overall result: that Darwin was "first" but Wallace would be considered co-discoverer and "first to publish." He was glad he reached out to Darwin rather than just publishing first. Darwin wrote at the time, "He must be an amiable man."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Island Hopper</b></div><div dir="auto">71) He does a major excursion through dozens of islands in the Malaysian archipelago with his trusted assistant Ali.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">72) Back and forth correspondence with Darwin, where Darwin sends Wallace the table of contents of his book, and shares with him what was going to be in it; it's quite beautiful how the two of them sorted out both credit for the discovery and also Wallace basically stepped aside and let Darwin write his work.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">73) Aspects of this particular trip are catastrophic, many of the islands are complete flora and fauna deserts with nothing interesting; he has some close escapes from Papuan headhunters and then has a terrible time trying to navigate among the various islands, getting lost, getting swept by currents, etc., over a 40-day miserable period where he and his team couldn't seem to get where they wanted to go. Finally, at age 39, after several years in the far East, Wallace decides to return home.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: First Darwinian</b></div><div dir="auto">74) It takes Wallace several months to get back home, via Singapore, then Suez, then overland to Alexandria, to France, and of course looking for flora and fauna throughout this return trip as well.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75) There's a cute story here, jumping ahead to many years later: one of Wallace's intellectual descendants, Thomas Barbour, happened to meet Wallace's assistant Ali in 1907. Ali was an old man by this time, and he had taken Wallace's last name as <i>his</i> last name. Quite beautiful.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76) Wallace manages to bring two live birds of paradise back home, they would fetch a lot of money when sold.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77) Wallace starts to engage in debates about evolution, references here to Thomas Henry Huxley who was "Darwin's bulldog."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">78) We also see a sort of evolutionary meta-debate about the human mind: whether it can be <i>also</i> a product of natural selection or (as Wallace came to believe) that the human mind was somehow separate, different, and thus perhaps designed.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79) Other evolutionary discussions: on types of mimicry as well as "warning coloration" and how natural selection could bring these to be; Wallace often to help Darwin see the big picture with "their" theory, helping apply the paradigm more effectively than Darwin himself could.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">80) Wallace falls in love and unexpectedly proposes to Marion Leslie, she rejects him, he's crushed. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">81) Wallace starts to get interested in the paranormal and seances; this becomes something that starts to embarrass Wallace's peers on his behalf: even Darwin was upset with this part of Wallace's intellectual journey, even though while Wallace is doing amazing work in other more "approved" scientific domains.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">82) Wallace then marries Annie Mitten, 20 years his junior, they have three children fairly quickly.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: A Tale of Two Wallace's?</b></div><div dir="auto">83) More discussion of Wallace's various apostasies, in particular how he felt that a complex organ like the human brain couldn't possibly be a product of the same natural selection mechanism as everything else; note here that Darwin considered the human brain and mind part of the same continuum as any other aspect of biology/anatomy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">84) Discussion of Wallace's "growing spiritualism": interestingly, he wasn't religious at all, but he did believe in some sort of separate power or force, this kind of talk was eye-rolling to his peers and harmful to his reputation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">85) He gets involved in a bet with a flat-earther named John Hampden, thinking it would be easy money; it ends up Hampden was a near-psychopath who tied Wallace up with legal problems for several years afterwards.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">86) Wallace starts to have some money problems, he takes a job as a test examiner for students, then his oldest son Bertie dies from scarlet fever at age 6.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">87) Wallace publishes The Geographical Distribution of Animals in two volumes in May 1876; this was a tremendously well received work; he also published works on modern spiritualism and miracles; he also gets caught up in the trial of fraudulent medium Henry Slade, an American who ended up being convicted, then appealed and overturned on a technicality, and then Slade fled the country; Wallace's reputation was again compromised because he acted as an expert witness for the defense!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>88) [An interesting, and sadly familiar, example here of consensus-forcing in scientific thought via economic incentives]</b>: Darwin asks Hooker to help arrange a pension for Wallace to help him economically, these pensions were available to English scientists to support scientific discovery. Hooker shoots down the idea: "Wallace has lost caste terribly." <b>[You can see how a "scientific consensus" can be easily enforced by mechanisms like this: stray too far outside the consensus, a little too far outside "approved" science... and <i>no pension for you!</i>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: A Socially Engaged Scientist</b></div><div dir="auto">89) [This chapter covers a lot of Wallace's social movements on land reform. <b>Fascinating to learn that Wallace actually was, shockingly, a big supporter of expropriation and redistribution of land, albeit he wanted to execute it over a period of generations. An example of his utopianist thinking.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">90) He stumbles on to Henry George's remarkable book <i>Progress and Poverty</i> which influences his thinking on economic inequality.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>91) Darwin and others were again deeply unsettled with Wallace's dalliances outside of true science, the author offers examples where Darwin wrote letters to Wallace and others indicating his concerns.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">92) Darwin dies, 1882.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">93) Wallace attempts unsuccessfully to publish his book <i>Land Nationalization</i> addressing his thoughts on land redistribution; his publisher backs out of publishing this hot political potato of a book, he does find another publisher however. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>94) Wallace also gets involved in the late 19th century controversy about smallpox vaccination using cowpox injections, Wallace <i>actually looks at the data</i> and sees low efficacy and high harms from these injections, he criticizes the government for mandating these vaccinations</b> (mandates began actually way back in 1853 but became much more stringent in the 1870s). <b>The author here has to make sure that he makes clear for modern readers how the anti-vax movement <i>today</i> is wayyyyy more disinformed, but <i>back then</i> Wallace really looked at the real data and "and had a solid leg to stand on." Interesting obligatory catechism here from the author.</b> He wants his reader to know, <i>for sure</i>, that Wallace would <i>never</i> be anything like a modern antivaxxer today. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>95) Note also that there was clear data showing elevated mortality and injuries from the smallpox vax then, as well as robust data showing a lack of efficacy, <i>but the authorities refused to look at the data and refused to change their mandates.</i></b> Again, striking and unsettling to see this. <b>[I encourage any readers curious to learn more about this rather vile chapter of totalitarian public health history to read <a href="https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-smallpox-pandemic-response-was" target="_blank">A Midwestern Doctor's substack and his extensively researched series on the topic</a>.]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">96) I think it's also worth noting that biography of Wallace was published in 2023, just as claims about the validity of COVID vax mandates began collapsing under robust evidence of low (even negative) efficacy and increasing evidence of harms. Yet the author <i>still</i> felt he needed to recite the "anti-anti-vaxxer" catechism cited in note #94 above. Very, very interesting.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">97) Wallace plans a huge trip to Australia, with a tour across the continental United States on the way; it will be a lecture tour; the steamboat ride to New York went so poorly, though, that he canceled the Australian part of this trip; Wallace does a successful lecture tour all across the United States, travels all the way to California, where he meets his brother and his family for the first time in many years, the lectures were generally very successful despite Wallace being in his 60s now.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">98) In California, Wallace meets with John Muir. Wallace also meets with then-president Grover Cleveland, although it doesn't go all that well: "I had nothing special to say to him, and he had nothing special to say to me, the result being that we were both rather bored, and glad to get it over as soon as we could."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Onward and Upward</b></div><div dir="auto">99) Wallace's daughter Violet never married.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">100) Wallace wrote a number of extremely important books late in his life, see in particular <i>Darwinism,</i> which was interesting on a few levels: that he automatically gave it a title that eclipsed Wallace's own independent discovery of natural selection; it also included many new elements of Darwin's theory including aspects like mimicry, as well as reinforcement (now called the Wallace Effect) and other factors.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>101) See also the mini-debate about hybrids in evolution:</b> one major criticism of natural selection was that as species start to diverge the phenomenon of hybridization would actually make that divergence non-adaptive (meaning: these two near-species might continue to intermix but they would produce weaker offspring or no offspring at all, thus they would be less reproductively fit). This is an interesting way to think about the "adaptativeness" of a divergence. Wallace had many debates, some quite vicious, with biologist George John Romanes on this point. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">102) Wallace's view on hybrids was that they would actually <i>reinforce</i> the divergence: Wallace's logic here is that since hybrid offspring impose a fitness cost on the parents, then selection will favor mechanisms that reduce the likelihood of hybridization to begin with. Thus we would have mechanisms of avoidance like shifts in courtship signals, or shifts in species recognition, or visual or pheremonal drivers of avoidance that would alter behavior. This would drive an acceleration of divergence and reinforce it. Hence the "reinforcement" which was later called the Wallace Effect. <b>[I hate to say it but if you think it through this is circular reasoning, nothing more.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">103) Wallace starts getting all kinds of awards, starts getting invited to all kinds of ceremonies late in his life. He declines nearly all of them. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104) Other political activities: he gets involved in women's rights, including women's rights to work and women's suffrage.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105) Wallace is tremendously productive even in the last decade or so of his life, publishing some seven books in the last thirteen years of his life (!) including a two-volume autobiography. Wallace dies after a short illness in 1908, at age 90.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab:</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>anadromous</i>: (of a fish such as salmon) migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn.</div><div dir="auto"><i>herps</i>: the collective name given to reptiles and amphibians, from the word “herpeton” the Greek word for “crawling things.” Herpetology is the branch of science focusing on reptiles and amphibians.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Michael Shermer: <i>In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace</i></div><div dir="auto">Ross A. Slotten: <i>The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace</i></div><div dir="auto">Thomas Paine: <i>Age of Reason</i></div><div dir="auto">Robert Dale Owen: <i>Lecture on Consistency</i></div><div dir="auto">David Williams: <i>The Rebecca Riots: A study in Agrarian Discontent</i></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">***<a href="https://archive.org/details/vestigesofnatura1860cham/page/n9/mode/2up" target="_blank">Robert Chambers: <i>Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation</i></a></div><div dir="auto">Alfred Russel Wallace: <i>The Malay Archipelago</i> (1869)</div><div dir="auto">Alfred Russel Wallace: <i>Darwinism</i></div><div dir="auto">Henry George: <i>Progress and Poverty</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-25399185683965063582024-02-26T11:57:00.000-08:002024-02-26T12:08:12.251-08:00Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert<div style="text-align: left;"><div>This book attempts to light a fire under a lost and broken generation, and teach that generation to reject all the soul-sucking vices, traps and prisons of modernity. It sends you down countless rabbit holes--Luis de Camoes, Anna Comnena, Anatoly Fomenko, Conradin, Herotodus, Charles Oman, and others--and thus pays intellectual dividends in ways you wouldn't expect. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, I recommend this book only to readers who can give this author a lot of rope both for <i>how</i> he writes and <i>what</i> he writes. If you are easily offended or cannot handle ideas with which you disagree... stay away. You'll just break your e-reader.</div><div><br /></div><div>Think of the writing of Nietszche, with all its force, combined with the writing of a still mostly sane Philip K. Dick, both of whom look at the world a lot differently than you and I do. And keep in mind this author tends to write in walls of text, with typos, grammatical errors and, occasionally, with incoherence. One gets the impression that English isn't his first language, and judging by his tendency to drop articles (a, an, the) I'd guess he could be from somewhere in Eastern Europe.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the post-modern era we are potty-trained to to marginalize anything that contains even the slightest whiff of sexism, racism, antisemitism, etc. If you're this kind of reader, again, stay away: this book contains all of the -isms and then some. Finally, if there might be any <i>reputational risk</i> for you in reading this book (imagine if your employer, spying on your social media activity for indications of wrongthink, finds this book on your Goodreads "Want To Read" list), then definitely stay away. You have a more pressing problem anyway: find a better job.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let me say it once again: you will have to meet this author halfway. Actually, more like most of the way. He's got some things he needs to say, and many of those things need to be said.</div><div><div><br /></div><div><div><br /></div><div><b>[Once again, a friendly warning to readers: <i>do not read any further.</i> The notes below are just my copy-pastes and notes from the text, they are meant to help me arrange and order my thoughts, responses and in some cases disagreements with the author. Life is short: please read no further!]</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Notes: </b></div><div><b>Prologue:</b></div><div>3: "If you look around [the] eyes of some people you see a kind of demented energy. It's pure anger or lust for power with nothing more... these people have an inhuman gaze and are vehicles for something else... You see it in the dead robot eyes of the new hue-man automatons running government departments, the DMV, the brutal zombies running the security in airports or hospital 'health care' rooms under vicious yellow fluorescent lights." <b>[In the photo below of the CDC's Mandy Cohen we see a standard example of "crazy eyes." Note if you cover the lower part of her face and look solely at her eyes, <i>her eyes are not smiling:</i> rather they give off an expression of fear, perhaps even terror.]</b></div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyTDZtGi57Ly6eNZnVvsNAW6ZeNQoTiR4_B1ZaJkNs398kc5fj779h9hi1JAJ_di0Ds2STMMehNjVIEJWfQgOlUC9slqnqai3cEXEsYTFXNhL6PIIzqjWv7bwbKFeIjr357o_gfzCzc6tFandpVUzZ5eDhfZB6_AZCGQcNGHJpFHMPQ86dCnwS_sDqNnP7/s425/Screenshot%202023-12-19%2010.56.28%20AM%20(1).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="425" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyTDZtGi57Ly6eNZnVvsNAW6ZeNQoTiR4_B1ZaJkNs398kc5fj779h9hi1JAJ_di0Ds2STMMehNjVIEJWfQgOlUC9slqnqai3cEXEsYTFXNhL6PIIzqjWv7bwbKFeIjr357o_gfzCzc6tFandpVUzZ5eDhfZB6_AZCGQcNGHJpFHMPQ86dCnwS_sDqNnP7/w400-h360/Screenshot%202023-12-19%2010.56.28%20AM%20(1).png" width="400" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div>5: "...ours is an age of surfeit." Life is too easy today, we are feminized, weak.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Part One: The Flame of Life</b></div><div>8: "The most noble animals refuse to breed in captivity."</div><div><br /></div><div>8: "Schopenhauer refers with contempt to the people who have their 'catalogues of monkeys' and think they understand nature. Darwin himself, Nietzsche called him a petty mind, the kind of calculator who likes to collect many small facts and synthesize some clumsy theory."</div><div><br /></div><div>9: The reader learns the term "Bug-man."</div><div><br /></div><div>10ff: On flaws in evolutionary theory [note also that the specific evolutionary mechanism of natural selection, as helpfully and elegantly as co-discoverers Darwin and Wallace formulate it, requires many epicycles to remain explanatory. See also Vox Day's fascinating mathematical argument that natural selection cannot <i>possibly</i> be the only driver of the speciation that has occurred over time: there are too many genetic fixings and not enough geological time for them all to happen; thus natural selection can only be a partial explanation for evolution.]</div></div><div><br /></div><div>13: "...the modern education, that teaches women to be hyper-aware, anxious for the future, abstract neurotics, etc., actually takes away their power to a great degree, while tricking them into thinking they are being tough or sassy; but a hyper-conscious woman is made powerless and charmless."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>13: "Darwin is meaningless without Malthus, but this is why Nietzsche is right about both of them when he says they describe only life in England, or more precisely the England of that time."</div><div><br /></div><div>15: On peoples who refuse to be enslaved, who would rather die instead (e.g,. the Comanche, the Polynesians) as opposed to peoples who willingly endure slavery, but do so at a monstrous price: "For this reason Nietzsche say[s], noble peoples do not endure slavery, they're either free or they die out. There is no 'adaptation' to slavery for some types of life. What is that people, who has chosen survival at any price? The price they paid was monstrous and such a people becomes monstrous and distorted if it accepts this. The distinction between master races and the rest is simple and true, Hegel said it, copying Heraclitus: those peoples who choose death rather than slavery or submission in a confrontation, that is a people of masters."</div><div><br /></div><div>21: Reference here to author/nutritionist Ray Peat, who is among people "treated as cranks" for their [non-narrative-approved] inquiries into the body's processes.</div><div><br /></div><div>24: On the category error of sacrificing the body to perfect the mind: "What of the mind then? Well as rare as beautiful bodies are, the mind in the same condition is even more rare. Let us strive, in our decrepit, cancerous and fetid world, for what is concrete and what we can try to attain. Those who forget the body to pursue a 'perfect mind' or 'perfect soul' have no idea where to even start. Only physical beauty is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well. Only sun and steel will show you the path."</div><div><br /></div><div>24-5: On the "onanism of modern society": "[A] chimp in [a] state of nature never jerks off, but in captivity he does, wat[sic] does this mean? In state of nature he's too busy, to put plainly. He is concerned with mastering space: solving problem of life in and under trees, mastering what tools he can, mastering social relations in the jockeying for power and status. Deprived of this drive to development and self-increase he devolves to pointless masturbation, in captivity, where he senses he is in owned space and therefore the futility of all his efforts and all his actions."</div><div><br /></div><div>25: Interesting take here: "Life in owned space becomes drained of energy through low-grade pointless titillation--and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/" target="_blank">nofap</a> is a kind of cargo cult that tries to reestablish energy in order, on path of ascent. Sometimes, however, it's a successful cargo cult, but whether it works or no can be seen usually within a week. The unfortunate thing about all this is that w*m*n have exceptionally good antennae for this kind of thing, and when a man frees himself from these pressures... they see this from very far away. They have an instinct to seek out ascending life and drain it... they and the species thereby achieve their goals, but you are bled dry and sometimes left a husk. They revert life back to its irritated state, and by their drainage of vital essence they've laid low many great tasks."</div><div><br /></div><div>26-7: On "holes" in society: prostitution, drugs, perversion etc: "The truth is that <i>they</i> are allowing these 'holes' because they, or the people who crafted the fabric in which the masters of lies operate, are smart enough to know you need these 'free spaces': they are of great use to a manipulator. See how the Japanese, so famed for their love of law and order, have nevertheless always allowed the yakuza to operate running prostitution and meth rings and even worse. Such things have a serious function in Japanese society, as the mafia and other institutions have had in Western society... [in this world of shadows] you might almost forget suffocating air of gravity outside, and feel for a few minutes like [an] animal before moment of hunt."</div><div><br /></div><div>28: On the development of society, agriculture: "...the majority of mankind suffered terribly also in their bodies from the coming of agriculture, the backbreaking labor, the malnourishment that shows itself in the smaller stature and more slender build of farmers' skeletons, of the destruction of their teeth, the atrophy of their brains and other organs. <b>Agriculture allowed a steady food source, an increase in numbers, and above all the maintenance of an elite, free from these exactions, that lived parasitically on the many. But agriculture broke the human animal and domesticated him."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>29: On alcohol intoxication: "I've often wondered at these times what it would be like, and how blessed life would be, if I could feel [intoxicated by alcohol] this way all the time and not just when I drink, and also never pay the price for it. Alcohol should never, by the way, be used for stress relief because after it crashes, and even the next day, there is a rise in cortisol so that unpleasant feelings become worse."</div><div><br /></div><div>29-30: Now onto math/logic: proof by syllogism/reason vs mathematicians or physicists "feeling" physical or mathematical relations. "Compare the Euclidian proof of the Pythagorean theorem, based on syllogism, which helps you understand nothing that's actually going on, with the imagistic proof of the three squares, that makes you perceive, physically perceive even in your body, why this theorem is true."</div><div><br /></div><div>30: Gauss' famous quote: "I got it... Now I have to get it." He felt the relation but now has to transmit it to others in a far more inferior language. "All great scientific discoveries, supposedly the great works of 'reason,' are in fact the result of intuitions and sudden grasp of ideas." </div><div><br /></div><div><b>31: [Ouch here, but he's right, modern people think of technology and science not too differently from primitive man, it's basically magic to us, and yet we have a lot more epistemic arrogance about it! At least primitive man <i>knew he didn't understand it</i>]:</b> "The modern peasant just replaces the artificial prejudices of superstitions and village old wives' tales with the superstitions of science, which he receives ready-made from authorities among the popularizers of science. He loves them because of the creature comforts he believes they provide through technology. He is a cargo cultist--he knows nothing of what goes into the discoveries of science, nor the way the substance is transmitted among scientists, he just has a propagandized image of some of the results... Science as popular religion brings no true consolation but instead feeds a kind of false pride..." "It actually makes the many more servile to the authorities who are presumed to understand and manipulate the technology."</div><div><br /></div><div>33-4: Now we are suddenly on to atheism: "Sam Harris, and Hitchens, and the 'new atheists,' there's nothing really new--they want to banish not just religion from public life, but to enter your own mind and replace whatever vestiges of old organized religions are there with their own very stupid organized religion. If they have an easy time of it, this is because monotheism overreached."</div><div><br /></div><div>34: "[Camille] Paglia said once that the real novelty of the one God was that he spoke the world into existence. How different this was from all other creation myths! All pagans knew the world was eternal, and that its present condition was a result of cycles of birth, rebirth, regeneration, copulation...</div><div><br /></div><div>34: The idea of a deity or creator that lives outside of matter, and created it from nothing "seems and feels wrong, or runs against the immediate perception of the world, so it requires faith, a concept unknown to ancient pagans of all kinds."</div><div><br /></div><div>35: "The weakness and spinelessness of modern man--no god would show himself to such creatures, to be jeered at! Why?... The true gods have a kind of power, but not the kind the many imagine. Why should they care for mankind? They are rare and precious, and it is for man to find, acknowledge, and honor them. This, at least, was the ancient view."</div><div><br /></div><div>38: On confusing your "self" with your intellect: "...if you love someone only for what they know or remember...everyone knows this is a betrayal because that's not <i>who you are.</i>"</div><div><br /></div><div>40: On the tremendous dangers of comfort-seeking, both for the individual and (more critically) for society: "...unfortunately in the long run the development of civilization and comfort leads to the proliferation of damaged life, the innovation of mankind leads to unspeakable abortions of life, and men on the periphery who want to preserve the natural order begin to plot the end of everything."</div><div><br /></div><div>40ff: On AI: "could one [an AI] hunt, or survive being hunted? In other words we think of AI in a totally narrow sense, and it really can't do what humans do, it never will. See also the "imbecility" of "the belief that you can 'upload' your intelligence to a computer and attain immortality" The author groups this with the "power fantasy of the nerd."</div><div><br /></div><div>41: Page 41 alone is enough to brand this book "anti-Semitic."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>41: "The nerd can be described as a person of inelegant and pedantic intelligence, often middling intelligence, who takes excessive pride in the intellect, even in the memorization of facts, the design of clumsy concepts to which reality is then expected to fit like [the] bed of Procrustes." [Nerd = midwit here.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>42: Also on the "nerd" craving prestige, gain, credibility; his activity is thus "forced"; "In men of intellect the desire for prestige is often the most disgusting, especially when there's no native manliness, because this leads to cowardice and lies, to others and oneself. For this reason Nietzsche said manliness is the first requirement of the philosopher..."</div><div><br /></div><div>43: "Youth and beauty are universally hated in almost all human societies in history. These societies are run by decrepit, sclerotic old men... Other times they promote ugliness in all ways: ugliness and perversity in custom, scarification, circumcision, self-mutilation."</div><div><br /></div><div>45: "Among the Greeks the man of power was called <i>aner</i>, who was different from the other word used, <i>anthropos</i>, which referred just to some shadow-being, indistinct, some kind of humanoid shape. The real man was rare, and most males were not and are not real men! The word in [the] beginning was used only for demigods and superhumans like Achilles or Diomedes or Odysseus."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Part Two: Parable of Iron Prison</b></div><div>48: "When you put some kind of working dog, like [a] terrier, even [a] cute Jack Russell in [a] city apartment, they will start to try to dig through the floor. This mode is inborn to them, they seek the development of their powers, and there are very few sadder things than to see [an] animal thwarted like this. Playing at becoming itself, but reduced to a doll and useless acting. Carl Schmitt said, “They've put us out to pasture.” This is the condition of life in [the] modern world." [Carl Schmitt: German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party.]</div><div><br /></div><div>49: "Houellebecq, whose explanations of the sexual problem of modernity, of the incel--all of these explanations are amazing and true, but even he is just following Nietzsche."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>49ff: Speculations on the origins of the modern flamboyant homosexual, or "queen" as the author puts it. Borrowing and combining ideas from Camille Paglia as well as a pseudonymous author Harro MJ to arrive at this quote: "It is not horseplay or the roughness of male competition as such that makes him turn away, but the utterly fake or artificial character of such displays, usually, in our time. Such [a] boy perceives what his peers don't, the conditional and entirely dependent character of life in our age. <b>It is not the masculinity, the competition for status among men, the physical roughness, that makes him turn away... but the fact that all such play is happening in already <i>owned space.</i> It is this aspect of our time that is crucial to understand."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>50: Interesting parenthetical thoughts about knowledge: "When I speak of something like owned space, it must not remain [a] mere word. When you understand something: I mean you must see and feel it like you would a landscape you know from youth, how to navigate all its nooks, the different heights of earth, the banks of streams, where the trees are and how it feels inside them, how long it takes walking from this or that group of beech to the abandoned factory, so that the map is already in your body. This is [the] only way to really understand something."</div></div><div><br /></div><div>51: "Roman teenagers of patrician class were sent already on missions on behalf of Empire abroad. Modern adult Western male seeks permission to watch other men playing sports, quaff vegetable oil relish, beg for 'coochie' in simulated intercourse, masturbation with plastic on dick... a precocious type of boy who seeks real development and the real domination of the space around him, who understands in his blood that play and manliness are to this end, precisely such a boy will have his expectations about life crushed and thwarted as soon as his eyes open."<br /><div><br /></div><div>52: "In becoming 'gay' he believes he is escaping that sense of primal limitation and subjection that he felt as a small boy: he has reinterpreted his entire drama as a maudlin story of sexuality suppressed or oppressed by retrograde social and political norms. In this he becomes an unwitting pawn himself of the very power that as a young boy he had intuited to be the enemy..."</div><div><br /></div><div>52: "And this brings up the question of who or what this force is. I think the answer to this problem isn't so simple, but one feature of this new condition in modern age is that the masters are hidden. That is even why this condition of subjection seems so suffocating, because <i>they hide</i>, and so there is no opportunity for open and manly challenge." <b>[Interesting to see references to the "<i>behind</i>-the-behind-the-scenes power" here, as well as in <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-great-taking-by-david-rogers-webb.html" target="_blank">three</a> <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/02/disintegration-indicators-of-coming.html" target="_blank">recently</a> <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/02/merchants-of-grain-by-dan-norman.html" target="_blank">reviewed</a> books at this site.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>54: "Look at [a] litter of pups, of whatever species, some will be inquisitive, playful, seek to experiment, to push boundaries, to leave [the] gaze of parents and the old, to conquer space; others will be far more docile and will lack curiosity. <b>The only ones who survive the modern education 'whole,' not to speak of the regime of modern medication, are precisely those in the litter who are born docile."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>55: On foolishly admiring "old" civilizations like those of Asia or the Near East.</div><div><br /></div><div>56: Withering comments here on the Koran: "...the Koran is, as Schopenhauer claimed, a tedious book of wretched, repetitive stupidity, with not a single new idea in it, 'the poorest form of theism.' Unfortunately this is sufficient for the level of most people's religious needs."</div><div><br /></div><div>57ff: On Buddhism as an escape from the city, from the fetid, suffocating city: "The Buddha became a world-denier in the city--look at his conversion, what drove him to it! It is the injustice but above all the filth, the disgusting suffocation of city life, the vision of life degraded and under distress, that led him to his escape... he said, 'the home is a place of filth.' <b>And what was this escape, after all, but just an attempt to re-establish the freedom and openness of the steppe, where man can once again be what he was born to be?"</b></div></div><div><br /></div><div>58: On the contrast of European cities vs the rest of the world: "In such way you must also understand 'the West,' or actually the city of the West. The small, orderly city of the north Italians, the German and Swiss cities Machiavelli praises for how well-run they are, this is entirely alien to the Orient..."<br /><div><br /></div><div>60: "Aristotle says Greeks are different from north Europeans and the Orientals. The Asian is civilized but slavish; the European barbarian is uncivilized, unlearned, but free. In this formula [it] is assumed Aristotle believed in a 'balance' between these two extremes, and that Greeks were better because they were the 'median' between these two deficient extremes." See also 12th century Byzantine historian Anna Comnena in her history <i>The Alexiad</i>, writing about her horror and fascination with western crusader/barbarians, in awe of their handsomeness, intelligence and bravery; see Herotodus praising and admiring the Scythians (Europeans) for how they outwitted the Persians (Asians).</div><div><br /></div><div>61ff: On the Greeks' longing for freedom and avoidance of the slavishness of the Asian/Persian; On the European city which in modernity has found a balance between nature/freedom and civiliation; on "bugmen" [NPC types who this author believes are modern descendants of serfdom from prior eras] who want to impose smaller cities/integral communities to "save the planet" but it will only be a vehicle for them to impose a quasi-marxism on people; the author notes also that the Sierra Club used to be anti-mass immigration because of the strains it imposed on nature; on the delusion that if we retrogressed or froze technology it would benefit the environment, etc.</div><div><br /></div><div>65: "I don't think we live just in some impersonal emergent mechanism, a 'system' that entraps everyone, something like 'managerialism,' or 'post-industrial ennui.' I think all of this was consciously crafted. <b>It's possible much of known history is falsified. Nietzsche among many others hinted at this."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>66: Odd tangent here on ultra-wealthy people: the author talks about a Rockefeller woman he once knew, who "had only contempt for the known rich who have to walk with retinues and bodyguards and are under constant surveillance by media and others." On freedom and power, living without constraint; see the movie <i>Mulholland Drive</i> for a metaphorical treatment of the "demented schemes." </div><div><br /></div><div>66: "Someone wore green gloves in Hong Kong." [WTF with this non-sequitur?]</div><div><br /></div><div>67: "In fact even Middle Ages man lived with more lust for life, even more sexual lust, than the modern: he worked less also. Most of the year there were feast days. There was the minimum amount of work done possible to have enough crops and to pay the taxes, that were relatively small. Most modern men hardly have the property of the medieval freeholder."</div><div><br /></div><div>68: Intriguing quote here: "The most significant of these “telepathic” connections is indeed when two such people, supremely suitable for each other on a biological path, recognize in each other this inner intention or striving of nature for the production of something--of course they think it’s about something very different. In the normal case this is almost always man and woman, for production of a certain child, that nature wants to bring into emergence. But on rare cases there can be other reasons for similar connection in will, such as, two friends who are intended to achieve some task together. “We reach out with open arms in anticipation of satisfying our desire or delusion, meanwhile nature achieves her secret intention.”</div><div><br /></div><div><b>70: "All real thoughts come only when you walk outside, standing up, in fresh air: I knew this long before I was made aware of it through Nietzsche, who says you should distrust any thoughts you've had indoors."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>70: Interesting comments here about various oppressions and power plays by various people on the "plantation" in modernity: the author describes a waitress trying to take away his coffee mug when he wasn't done, etc. </div><div><br /></div><div>71: "Traffic lights train you to obedience like animal in cage, especially at night when there are no other cars around." <b>[Interesting here too, a conflict of vision: the west is high-trust, his criticism of the third world is exactly what is reversed here: the westerner who the author thinks has the chance to be free is exactly the type of person who would obey the red light when no one else is around!]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>71-2: "Some talk about this 'madness behind things.' ... When Heraclitus speaks of all things being one, and all things being fire, he means this: when this actually shows itself to you, there is a demoniac and violent madness underlying things. The real world is similar to the apparent, but uncanny, devilish, disordered for us. Its hidden order, the fatal X behind things, reaches for things and aims beyond our scope as humans... Its origin and happenings and its fate is in the play and war of the most gruesome factions, forgotten gods... to them we're like stowaway rats on a ship."</div><div><br /></div><div>73: Comments here on religious worldviews: the Hebrew faith fundamentally based on "saw that it was good"; Islam likewise; Hinduism and Buddhism see the world as something you must escape; <b>[see also this quote: "But also, if you imagine the pleasure of an animal eating versus the pain and agony of the animal being eaten, you can't be fooled ...you see that suffering exceeds pleasure or happiness in this world, by many magnitudes."]</b>; "Gnosticism is driven by the problem of suffering, or compassion for those who suffer, and tries to absolve God of responsibility for this state of things."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>74: "Sometimes [Gnosticism] says the God of the Bible was put to sleep, or imprisoned himself, or that he is bound with chains of adamantine and kept in a cage, and that a usurper took his place. Other times it says that the God described in Genesis isn't the real God, but a demiurge, and the real God sent his emissary Jesus to overturn the rule of this demiurge.There are many variations, and some interject not one demiurge, but ninety-nine, all to remove responsibility from the Godhead for the creation of this world of evil. They should have just become Buddhist or Hindu and stopped trying to save the mythology of Canaan!"</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>75: On the fact that the entire known world is now settled, there's no escape, no place to go for adventures. Domestication has been imposed on everyone by the state, etc.</b> "It is the very character of domestic life to present the world as an enclosed owned space, and, although mankind adapts itself on the whole to this condition, both biologically and culturally, yet there remains a glimmer of the opposite tendency inside even the lowliest. He can't help but experience this new state of things in late civilizations except with dread, the dread suspicion... an uncanny suspicion... that the world is artificial. He begins to sense that this hothouse he lives in is the malevolent creation of a demiurge that likes to observe our sufferings, that He and his minions feed on them. In the remote future, should the evil of human innovation continue unchecked, we really will live in the world the Gnostics feared..."</div><div><br /></div><b>76: "I have no doubt your religions are true, but can you be sure some vicious faction didn't insert itself into the hierarchy of priests some time ago, or of religious authorities, or of book printers, and insert all kinds of things that weren't there to begin with?</b> For example, all Old Slavonic copies of the Bible in Russia used to have heavy Gnostic interpolations. This explains the multitude of such sects that sprung up there... how do you think the Cathars found such currency in north Italy, in the Rhineland? It wasn't just a new teaching, but very old practices and old formulas that found a ready home among a population long prepared to receive them. ...Islam could very well be such a forgery: the Koran is a mishmash of nonsense, and possibly was originally a Syriac Christian devotional book that was re-edited much later. Mohammed was their name for Christ, and the faith originally was a version of Nestorianism that was spread by the Persian king, not by Arabs."</div><div><br /></div><div>76: "But do you have any idea how speculative the conclusions drawn from archaeology are in general? Just read, for example, the kind of 'evidence' they used to establish horse-riding on the great steppe before 1000 BC--a few, maybe not even five or six, bones that seemed to look like bits."</div><div><br /></div><div>77: "Look at Thucydides, who is a great man and a genius of the ages: he seeks to outdo Herodotus, and this pattern is followed throughout all antiquity. Each great historian was setting out to outdo his predecessor as a rival. Do you think they made some things up? <b>How much do you think then that the scholar, the scribe, the vain 'monk'--the 'nerd' as a type--is likely to lie?</b> They will lie far more than you think... <b>the nerd more than a Thucydides is possessed by infinitely greater mendacity and also vanity, jealousy, spite and pettiness. Don't you think such people, who, for the longest time in the form of the monk were the only keepers and copiers of texts from antiquity, don't you think they would be willing to change the text, to add, and even to make up entire books and authors?</b> Corroborations from 'third sources' would be relatively easy to manufacture as well. ...Much of antiquity could have been invented by sects or orders of Christians or even Jews, to make it look like their contrived and artificial, utilitarian religions had some basis in human nature or were anticipated by wise men in the past."</div><div><br /></div><div>78: "Every new form of life among mankind seeks to blot out the memory of its predecessors, to rewrite the history, and maybe does so literally, corrupting the texts themselves." <b>[You can't help but think here of the famous two photos of Stalin with, and without, Nikolai Yezhov]:</b></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7BDIcN6uET82pPVs9GFiljWqibUmiwuHhOftjzCf48HKJNwVurNoR-kH4LL6PDbq-w6DoCI-eXNQFbu2JGyvC8J7cvRgt2RTS_nM3rsyh_gYEZKNidj_qKh8y8wrplVXjJ4OeRdbsWVNHd9dSrwTTvNUe-H8j8QVLE1-FkpxyFEHl7C3D85QOTMpxV0dX/s960/ei4apkrrxfla1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7BDIcN6uET82pPVs9GFiljWqibUmiwuHhOftjzCf48HKJNwVurNoR-kH4LL6PDbq-w6DoCI-eXNQFbu2JGyvC8J7cvRgt2RTS_nM3rsyh_gYEZKNidj_qKh8y8wrplVXjJ4OeRdbsWVNHd9dSrwTTvNUe-H8j8QVLE1-FkpxyFEHl7C3D85QOTMpxV0dX/w640-h360/ei4apkrrxfla1.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div>78: "[Saint] Augustine is almost surely a complete fiction, and there never was any such man--his pidgin 'Greek' is nonsense in that area to begin with, and is rather the makeshift Greek of the medieval monk, maybe living somewhere in Burgundy."</div><div><br /></div><div>78-9: Even wilder theories here! The New Testament was written by a Jewish woman in an effort to overturn Roman life and "Roman privilege"... with this in mind then "Does this sound familiar in our own time, when monstrous historical hoaxes... including the so-called and entirely <i>fake</i> 'Cold War,' during which the United States was funding and arming the Soviet Union the whole time?"</div><div><br /></div><div><b>79: On the ludic need for things to be "known" and how people can't handle the discomfort of questioning what they know.</b> "Such speculations are the opposite of comforting, especially in a world where the consolations and certainty of religion are rare. History has somewhat taken the place that religion had, I mean to provide stability to a world that is otherwise lost in complete confusion and chaos and uncertainty."</div><div><br /></div><div>79: "I want this chaos, because what I want to bring thrives in it." <b>[Here perhaps is the central idea of a Bronze Age mindset: loving chaos, loving the lack of structure, seeing the "structure" of modernity as just another prison, an "owned space," and figuring a way to break out of this prison somehow, etc.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>79: Rabbit hole right here with the work of Anatoly Fomenko and his phantom time hypothesis and the [insane-sounding] assertion that the Crusades and the Trojan War were the same event. [???]</div><div><br /></div><div>81: On the lie of the "noble savage"; the author cites the Samoans "punking" Margaret Mead: "most of the things she wrote about their views on life, about their sexual freedom, was nonsense they made up to make her look foolish."</div><div><br /></div><div>81-2: Ironies of assuming matriarchies in the leftist's vision of the noble past when this couldn't possibly be the case; but also the paradox that modernity actually does have a sort of matriarchy: "When many of you moderns pine for 'communal living,' and talk about inter-generational households... you seem to forget that this would mean subjection to a strong-willed Dragon or Gorgon lady. The modern girl, when she pines for the community of the pre-modern extended family imagines that she gets from it the emotional and social support of her female cousins, and a crew of servants in the grandmothers, not the reality... which is utter subjection to the mother-in-law... In the end then the 'left' is more correct: the worship of the titanic powers of the earth, of the Great Mother, is connected to a kind of matriarchy, but where they're wrong is in imagining that this leads to any kind of freedom, that it represents a kind of liberation from the strictures of modern civilization..."</div><div><br /></div><div>83: The problem of the young male: "Communal solidarity absorbs and snuffs out any personal distinction or intelligence and this task is relatively easy where it concerns the majority of the parts of the village: the real problem becomes what to do with the young males. In every way they represent a threat to the established customs and the physiological torpor that benefits the old and the women. The social problem in primitive tribes as well as most civilized and unfree societies becomes this, what to do with the young males, their aggression, their sexual instincts: in every way they must be broken and subsumed for the benefit of the tribe."</div><div><br /></div><div>83-4: [This helps explain some of the demographic self-burying certain countries are embarking on as they embrace immigration to a level much higher than their culture's ability to sustain] "You fool yourself if you imagine that 'young males are needed for protection from external threat.' In fact most societies of the settled, primitive and as well as civilized, are more than willing to accept the risk of submission to an alien tribe. ...such societies, ruled by women, the old, and the imbeciles, are willing to rather accept subjection to the alien than to allow freedom and flourishing for their young men. ...submission to the alien just often means some sporadic taxation that used to be relatively hard to enforce: peasants are very good at hiding stores of goods, and even fields. The routine humiliations of subjection, the loss of honor, the rare but occasional rapes, the loss of sovereignty means little to such people."</div><div><br /></div><div>84: "The Chinese Han faced the most dreadful external threats from the steppe, and were frequently conquered by a few scattered men on horseback that they outnumbered many times over. They didn't care: their stolid, unchanging life as a community continued, whether it was Jurchen or Mongol or Black Yi that preyed on them. The Indians, once they reached their period of priestly rule and senescence, also degenerated to this condition: they were conquered every summer by adventurers and warlords from the Hindu Kush and beyond. Afghanistan ruled India. But subjection suited them."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>85: On China's brief experiment with masculinity, "of letting their own men assert themselves and gain the sovereignty": "On the brief occasion in the 15th century when they began to have a navy, with its glimmers of freedom and empowerment for youths, they noticed the ferment and disorder that this brought to their society and immediately quashed the whole project."</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>85: "The way of settled life is just this then: to break the youths from early age, to take the boys and caponize them physically, mentally and spiritually."</b></div><div> </div><div><b>86: "But enough of this prison. I suppose you want to know of a way out, or, at least, to hear of a different way of life?"</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Part Three: Men of Power, and the Ascent of Youth</b><br /></div><div>87: "Life appears at its peak not in the grass hut village ruled by nutso mammies, but in the military state. In Archaic Greece, in Renaissance Italy and in the vast expanse of the heroic Old Stone Age, at the middle of the Bronze Age of high chariotry, lived men of power and magnificence in great numbers. We are in every way their inferiors."</div><div><br /></div><div>87: "We find Paleolithic bones, the femur, so robust that nothing from our runners or power-lifters equals."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>87: "You know about Marathon, but not the whole story. The real physical feat wasn't just the soldier who ran the twenty miles or so back to Athens to warn the people. The entire army ranged on the beach in heavy bronze armor, facing the enemy. After the Persians landed, the Greeks charged them from more than a mile away. The Persians were amazed at the line of gleaming bronze running toward them and their war cry. These men ran a mile in very heavy armor and also carried six-foot-plus ashen spear-spike. They drove the invaders into the sea. And right after this great effort they marched, still in armor, all the way back to Athens without pause, to prevent the Persians from making an opportune landing there. I don't think any special military units would be able to equal this feat today, and these were the average citizens of Athens."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>87: "Here [in 5th century BC Greece] we have life at its peak. You know about their great art, science, and literature, or think you do. But these were men of conquest, exploration and adventure first. <b>Aeschylus had on his tombstone engraved that he fought at Marathon, not that he wrote his plays."</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>88: "I'm afraid that, in the end, the examples of ancient men of strong hand, ancient men of power, will be very discouraging to many of you.</b> Because you can't easily replicate their achievements and power in our time, and also, many of you are actually sissies compared to them, in your blood. But I think it's good for all of us to remember we're panty-wearers compared to them. Also, while you may not be able to emulate them in every way, because the age we live in is one of total repression, you can still take some inspiration from their examples, and try to live the same in some way... try to live according to a Bronze Age Mindset."</div><div><br /></div><div>88: "Only the warrior is a free man. The only right government is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom. You must aim high!"<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>88: Striking take here on the reign of Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner.</div><div><br /></div><div>89-90: On Alcibiades of Athens, imagined as a modern; "He rejected the advances of the Pelasgian pedo-pervert Socrates, a story that Plato then inverted and twisted like the lying cunt and Phoenician-asskisser that he was." [!!!]</div><div><br /></div><div>90: "In the beginning was the word?? NO! In the beginning was the demonic fire that bursts out in men like Alcibiades and lays low the cities of men and exposes all their nonsense! Such men are sent by nature to chastise us and be our Nemesis. They are the great cleansing. His story is told by Thucydides and Plutarch, though you must know the latter is a famous liar. But I think there must be someone as colorful as Alcibiades among you."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>91: The modern world "promotes the stressors, estrogen, serotonin, hyperventilation, over-excitation, the hallmarks of energetic exhaustion. Loss of structure, form and differentiation follows, which was the intention."</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>91: [On living with little to lose but still fearing to lose even that.]</b> "There follows on this also a spiritual and intellectual rigidity, the orientation of the ideologue, of the social activist, but also of all our intellectual class right and left, as of those who work in the corporate world and in most of the military. They're stiff and constrained because, in short, they live in utter fear, fear that they will lose something. They have very little to lose, but they live in this fear anyway and this is why when there is a question of potential gain or, worse for them, potential loss, they react with desperation, they freeze in terror and hyperventilate." <b>[Also, recall the joke: Why are academics so vicious to each other? Because the stakes are so small.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>91: The ancient Greeks admiring "a carelessness and freedom from constraint that would shock us."</div><div><br /></div><div>92: "The way our own elite today marries and pairs off, by the way, is anything but 'eugenic': two over-the-hill spent people in their thirties marrying for 'practical' reasons... this doesn't give rise to strong children."</div><div><br /></div><div>92: On Herotodus' story of Hippocleides, who went with dozens of other youths to try to marry the daughter of a rich important autocrat in Sicily: "[The autocrat] said, 'Hippocleides you have just danced yourself out of a marriage' ...but the answer was 'Hippocleides doesn't care.' In this one phrase you have the whole attitude of this beautiful, reckless piratical aristocracy that colonized and conquered their known world. It's an attitude that upsets all the moralfags of our time, of the left and right."</div><div><br /></div><div>93: "Another story shows you the same thing: it is also the attitude of Diogenes the Cynic. When Alexander the Great came before his bathtub and asked him what he would want most of all in the world, Diogenes told him to get out of the way, stop blocking the sun... he was just trying to catch some rays! <b>Now compare that to one of our slavish intellectuals and philosophers, and how their meager spirits would huff and puff at the approach of even a mid-level constipated bureaucrat</b>--how distinguished! The <i>honor</i>! Alexander said that if he had not been Alexander, he would wish to have been Diogenes."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>93: "Anything truly great must have some of this divine carelessness. Didn't the Christians also believe in 'give us but our daily bread'--implying that this is enough and you shouldn't worry about anything else, even for the week? Nietzsche say[s] good things about poverty, independence, and being of good cheer. And these were very poor men: but the sons of God need nothing more!"</b></div><div><br /></div><div>93: Modern women as "Bernankefied up the ass" so they can become neurotic copies of gay desk-workers. They've abandoned the great power endowed in their blood."</div><div><br /></div><div>94: "...the left talks much about letting loose, about no longer being repressed. If they only understood what this really meant!"</div><div><br /></div><div>94ff: Stories here of Clearchus, of Agathocles, "who weren't held back by petty inhibitions. These are men who really knew how to enjoy their freedom, and who weren't limited by the opinions of others."</div><div><br /></div><div>95: "...small people like Bill Gates, Zuckerface, and Bezos are entirely dependent men. They can't really do with their wealth what you think they can for example, they could never just kill a man and take his wife, but even the ruler of the smallest African country has this power, this true wealth."</div><div><br /></div><div>96: On comparing the life of Alcibiades to the "life" we are encouraged to "have" today: pharmaceuticals, cheap wine, "the rancid fart-fumes of status and approval they beg from each other."</div><div><br /></div><div>96: "We take the wolves and lions and leopards from among us when pups and break them with false ideas, vicious conditioning, and lately, drugs that would have lobotomized a da Vinci, an Alexander, a Frederick the Great out of existence in his youth. <b>Then the energy that remains to them is channeled into mindless work for money."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>97: "So when I mention leisure, don't imagine I mean by it what you mean by it. It's not just leisure, you don't need just leisure for higher life, but specifically leisure for preparation for <i>war</i>."</div><div><div><br /></div><div><b>98: "Constrained and dependent people don't have real thoughts: for [the] same reason that nations without manufacturing don't really understand anymore what 'innovation' and invention was for in the first place.</b> So our science and technology too is just more diddling."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>98: "Cervantes completed Don Quixote while in jail, Spinoza was a lens-grinder, Diogenes was homeless, and many other great things were done by people who were poorer or in direr straits materially than people today."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>99: "...as Nietzsche says: in [the] French Revolution, a mass revolt of racial slaves that remade Europe and took it on the downward path. Then there was another peripheral aboriginal revolt in 1917, that plunged Europe into a civil war from which it still hasn't recovered."</div><div><br /></div><div>99: On our misconstrual of the Greeks, that the hoplite soldiers were uniform tools of democracy: "[Moderns] think of this age as one where the individual subsumed himself to the city and its laws, to the discipline of the ranks: and they connect this seeming egalitarianism to the practice of democracy in our time. In this way they want to flatter themselves. Modern man is then called on to make a similar “sacrifice,” and blamed for his selfishness." </div><div><br /></div><div>99-100: "This is confused. In beginning the hoplite, the man who fought with heavy round shield, tall spike, and heavy armor, he did not come as a 'tool' of the republic or a democracy, the way modern soldiers are tools of the slave state. If you want to see what the spirit of the Bronze Age is, you look to ancient drinking song, at the mess halls of Crete and Sparta: 'This is my wealth: my spear and my shield. With this I trample sweet wine from the vine. With this I am called master of serfs. Those who do not dare to have spear and sword, and fine leather shield to protect skin, all cower at my knee and submit, calling me master and great king.' This was real song: a popular drinking song among the ruling men. Such formed small companies of adventurers who, early on, took over the state away from the mounted aristocracy--themselves equally piratical predators."</div><div><br /></div><div>100: "But to draw any parallels to our time is absurd: these men would have never submitted to abstractions like 'human rights,' or 'equality,' or 'the people' as some kind of amorphous entity encompassing the inhabitants of the territory or city in general. They would have rightly seen this as pure slavery, which is our condition today: no real man would ever accept the legitimacy of such an entity, which for all practical purposes means you must, for entirely imaginary reasons, defer to the opinion of slaves, aliens, fat childless women, and others who have no share in the actual physical power."</div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>101: "...if you think this question through, you will understand also the nature of our subjection in this time. Because it is not these people who are at fault, but a hidden power that uses them as a pretext. Modern 'democracy' is totalitarian and vicious..."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>101ff: On male friendships subverted by the system today, on groups of males in sciences and art who could focus and direct real power: <b>these institutions now have non-hostile environments, are subject to human resources, etc., they've been caponized essentially. The system wants you as "a weak and isolated individual."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>103: On Silicon Valley: "...there wasn't any serious innovation being done in the first place: <b>already technology had been reduced to the development of dick pic apps for adolescents. Science has long ago ceased and been castrated."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>103: On Epaminondas and Pelopidas, who freed Thebes from Sparta: "it was they who established the famous 'Sacred Band,' the elite military unit that broke the power of Sparta. <b>This group was formed of close friends, and you will always have too much love and compassion for a real friend to waiver in courage in front of him--but I doubt you understand what such friendship means or that you ever had such [a] friend!"</b></div><div><br /></div><div>103: "In Athens the two friends Harmodius and Aristogeiton put down the tyranny through their schemes and their bravery: this is, you know, <b>why all tyrants and totalitarians are suspicious of strong friendships between men.</b> Most of all this is feared by the middle-aged lesbos and defectives that are used as guards by our prison-states." <b>[Wow, this guy is absolutely relentless!]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>103: "And yes, I know the rumors that these friendships were sexual, but I believe this is [a] misunderstanding and exaggeration promoted by the homonerds of our time, for reasons I will explain later. The model for all such friendships was that between Achilles and Patroclus: Homer never hints such friendship was sexual. It is only out of the poverty of our imagination that we think it was, because we can't conceive of such intense love between friends without some carnal or material benefit in play."</div><div><br /></div><div>104: "It was out of his friendship for Patroclus that Achilles embarked on his great rampage: it was for the sake of his friend that he would not tolerate living a long and inglorious life at home... <b>he chose instead a short and glorious one, and a violent death full of promise and beauty. Friends can spur you to this!"</b></div><div><br /></div><div>104: "The original form for all this was the divine pair of charioteers: Castor and Pollux, or for the Aryans it was the Ashvin twins, and for the Saxons it was Horst and Hengist, the pair of the chariot driver and the archer--do you understand this is the real root of all the higher aspirations of Europe?"<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>105: On scouting movements, in Germany and the USA; also intriguing thoughts here about the Jewish youth guard movements that became Zionists: "Among the Jews, the promotion of this kind of camaraderie and friendship was a great miracle in the early 20th century, because it so much went against their culture of the cramped <i>shtetl</i>, of nerds dominated by women and old people and by fear. It was a great act of self-overcoming for them, and many are right that in some sense the creation of Israel is the most 'anti-Semitic' act ever conceived. It is, in any case, a great model for others to show that reestablishment of antiquity is fully possible, although there is no real reason why Americans or Europeans should have any regard for the welfare of this country." [holy cow, ouch.]</div><div><div><br /></div><div>105: "In our time friendship is made illegal between boys in school, real fraternities are for all purposes banned, and the scouting movements are forced to accept women--and women are destructive entirely of any great friendship. <b>In private life, friendship among isolated and defeated modern males is unheard of.</b> Men are deluded into thinking their wife can also be their best friend (and this, of course, also makes their wives lose respect for them)."</div><div><br /></div><div>106ff: On the "Superman mindset": "inside every noble Greek was an unquenchable lust for power, and this means power to become lord over life and death in your state. It's hard to understand what this means from looking around today, because there's nothing like it from the big examples you might have heard. Many of you might think of dictators in North Korea or some public lavatory of the world, or of the great total states of the last century, but you'd be wrong. These men weren't really free or powerful, in many ways they were hostage to their own security services. Someone like Stalin was trapped in a stream of events where his freedom to operate existed only in the realm of murder, and murder alone, and any small step outside of this would mean his doom."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>107: "In fact the great totalitarian states you know about weren't that different from our own, or the 'liberal democracies': we live in the same kind of state, only that it is more prosperous and the viciousness of the power is indirect and hidden. But it is no less monstrous."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>107ff: Very strange, seemingly irrelevant discussion here of Periander of Corinth and his various actions and debaucheries.</div><div><br /></div><div>110ff: On Lysander, the Spartan, who defeated the Greeks, ended the Peloponnesian War, was worshipped as a god; see also Brasidas, another Spartan warrior, dying gloriously in battle; "It's not a surprise that you see men of this type of man come out of Sparta: the place that made the sternest demands on itself produced also the most brilliant men. They went rogue and easily imposed the intensity of their magic charisma on foreigners. True power needs no effort: it draws all around it like a force-field."</div><div><br /></div><div>110ff: "In [the] <i>Iliad</i> you see the greatest warriors rise up to fight even the gods."</div></div><div><br /></div><div>111: On "the fact that the genius sees this same world we do, but sees in it things that we can't, much like we see things that dog or ant can't. <b>Indeed time itself entirely changes when the will is raised up to this height: the warrior in some way can be said to rise outside the stream of events in which we are held like prisoners."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>111-2: "And you must understand one thing: the end of Achilles' mission was the total destruction of the city of Troy, the fire melting the brick of its alleys, its men killed, its women and children sold into slavery. This last was held to be the right of conquerors throughout the history of the Greek world, or at least for its vital period of ascent. Thus this most humane and refined of ancient peoples found it absolutely necessary nevertheless to have this out for the wolfish and predatory instinct in man. War alone brought rejuvenation of their nature."</div><div><br /></div><div>112: "The Romans, before they conquered a new city, promised the gods of that city that they would honor and respect them tenfold more than the inhabitants."</div><div><br /></div><div>112: [Sounds like this author has read <i><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-origin-of-consciousness-in.html" target="_blank">The Bicameral Mind</a></i>! "And it was only possible because such men knew also how to listen to the voice of the gods, and allowed themselves to be entirely possessed by a divine madness. It imbued them with superhuman strength, and drew others into their designs by instinct. This abandon to nature and instinct--this is the Bronze Age way! And you can learn to cultivate this exalted psychosis inside you also." [See also, a page later]: "You've been abandoned by the gods."</div><div><br /></div><div>113ff: On the excesses of Nero, Caligula, Tiberius: On Caligula: "Sometimes he replaced the regular gladiator shows with pathetic fights between cripples and deformed animals; he would lock down the granaries to let the people go hungry for no reason at all. He was the greatest troll ever." The author contrasts this with the effete, pathetic examples of decadence of our elites today; </div><div><br /></div><div><b>115-6: On Kleobis and Biton, the twins in the story Solon tells Croesus about true happiness; they died at their acme; thus this is a metaphor for the idealized Greek life;</b> "This story confused Croesus the king, and it probably confuses you. It's strange to see how far the Greeks took aesthetic understanding of life and the world. <b>There is no moral lesson in this story at all.</b> Any moral lesson that you could think of, for example of duty to parents or to tradition, could have been made in [a] different way. What's unusual here is the ending. <b>There is just biology: it is best for the end and the acme to coincide.</b> A beautiful death at the right time is the only key to understanding a life, its only hidden “meaning.” <b>It is a beautiful death to die after accomplishing a great feat for the glory of one's city, family and for the gods, but it's greater still to die in one's prime, at the height of your powers and at the acme of their discharge.</b> A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur."</div><div><div><br /></div><div><b>116ff: "The most glamorous Christian prince for me was always young Conradin, King of the Romans and King of Jerusalem.</b> He was unjustly killed in Italy by usurper Charles of Anjou with the contrivance of a corrupt Pope." He conquered Rome at the mere age of 14, the outpouring of love for him by the people alarmed the Pope and the sclerotocracy, he "never listened to the timid counsels of his advisors who tried to hold him back from his acme." Then a series of disasters, captured by treachery, beheaded by Charles of Anjou; <b>"[Conradin's] execution was so absurd and unjust that it permanently discredited Charles of Anjou, the usurper. It discredited too this kind of Papal 'legalism' that must sound very familiar to you now."</b> "...the people will not be fooled: they know the real man of power, and can tell the difference from a deformed usurper." "Now the robots who run our world also want to be loved or feared, and are trembling because the people don't respect them. They too, the nations of our time, seek the return of youth, of a Conradin."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>118ff: "Crusaders like Cortes and Pizarro, Fernando de Soto, Drake and Raleigh, Magellan and Balboa equal in daring, intelligence, magnitude of spirit, resourcefulness and achievement any of the great men of the Greeks and Romans.</b> The story of the heroic age of exploration remains to be told in full, and maybe one of you one day will make [a] big book or big movies."</div><div><br /></div><div>119: "I say also now: for those who seek to make a difference and have some artistic or visual bent, movies are the golden key to the minds of the many. What Mel Gibson does is worth a thousand books or 'activisms' for your side."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>119ff: On the works of Portuguese poet/explorer Luís de Camões,</b> also the astounding, mythological adventures of the great European explorers: "...he is right that the voyages of these new crusaders equal any great expedition even from the myths and legends of the past... Perched on the beaches of the great Eurasian mass, these men went, in just a hundred years, from sailing a few almost-rafts that they barely knew how to navigate, to explorers of new worlds and founders of global empires that lasted for centuries. <b>You must understand how amazing this feat was: there was no tradition of seamanship in Portugal or Spain, let alone France or England... it all had to be done from scratch."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>120: On many of the great explorers being ignored because of their Christianity: "...most of the modern glorifiers of antiquity usually had an axe to grind against Christianity or the Church, so they didn't want to promote these men, or admit that the champions of the faith were the most shining exemplars of the classical man in our time. Even Nietzsche stays away from them and, in a moment of weakness, speaks nonsense about the “superiority” of the Aztecs."</div><div><br /></div><div>120: "More than anyone else they spread its power and gospel through the world, and even before that, they saved Europe itself from the Moors and the other threats. They're the direct descendants of the crusaders who liberated Spain and other parts of Europe. The Church doesn't want to admit that once Ferdinand and Isabella cleared Spain of the enemies of Christ, God blessed that nation with a century of prosperity and pre-eminence, and gave it the foundation of world-empire." <b>[Note here to self to read the almost certainly non-narrative-approved book <i>The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise</i> by Dario Fernandez Morera]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>122ff: On Pedro de Alvarado, right hand man of Cortes, "of boundless courage, carelessness, and also boundless cruelty. Cortes left him in charge briefly in Tenochtitlan where he massacred all the Aztec nobles in the Great Temple during a banquet... for no reason at all. During the battles he distinguished himself by insane charges into the thick of the enemy by which he was outnumbered by hundreds to one: yet he never lost heart, he went right for their garish flower-decorated lieutenants and cut them down, striking fear into the multitude... Alvarado was a nemesis to civilization, and this is right and good. <b>God sends such men to chastise mankind.</b> I want you to be like this: to listen to these instincts in you... I predict this: within fifty years a hundred Alvarados will bloom from deep in the tropical bestiary of the spirit. They will sweep away the weakness of this world."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>123ff: On a modern warrior, Frenchman Bob Denard:</b> "How different he is from the pretentious bureaucrats we see, the politicians with their high-flown language, their tedious moral preaching, their careful self-positioning, timidity, and the drudgery to which they subject themselves." "He took part in adventures all over Africa: coups in Benin, the Congo, secessionist movements like in Biafra (the French styling on English Nigeria) and so forth. His greatest feat was to overthrow the government of the Comoros four times. Each time France had to send special forces to the islands to dislodge him... At the end of his life... well this life lasted too long. He should have died in defense of his territory, younger, and without descending into the dementia and pain that took him in old age. France repaid his service with persecution; no longer needed to fight communists in Africa, his vainglory and ferocity became a liability."</div><div><br /></div><div>124ff: On Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare, "another example of why you're a fag." [WTF!!?? Wow. I don't know whether to laugh, be hurt, or be offended!] "He led an elite unit of mercs in the Congo, and in the same operation with Denard, was responsible for relieving Stanleyville and saving a hundred nuns and missionaries from rape and torture."</div><div><br /></div><div>125: "Even just a few years ago Margaret Thatcher's son Mark was given a sentence in South Africa in 2005 for an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was ratted out and caught at the airport. <b>You must understand that the meddlesome little cretinoids who run the West always put a stop to great plans and great actions.</b> They've ended many promising adventures through their snooping... they're tattletales, always watching, never sleeping, always whispering."</div><div><br /></div><div>126: "Neall Ellis in his trusty Mi-24 Hind helicopter held off the rebels in the Sierra Leone civil war, singlehandedly, and saved innumerable lives. In the Rhodesian war, you had companies of a few white farmers, raised in the bush, who ambushed armies of Zambia and Mozambique many thousands strong. They would attack with stealth, stalking them, inflict frightful casualties, and escape unharmed. Many such stories: look up Nyadzonya raid." [here: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eland&source=gmail&ust=1705883936879000&usg=AOvVaw3msC3TWJCAmzEwIhofmPuw" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eland" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.<wbr></wbr>org/wiki/Operation_Eland</a> ]</div><div><br /></div><div>126: The potential for adventures and conquests like European man has rarely experienced in the past still exists, and I have no doubt that in the coming years such opportunities will become ever more frequent. The great Leviathan will falter, sooner or later. The coming age of barbarism will not be owned, as so many of you urban cucks fear, by the gangbangers and the unwashed hordes of the teeming cesspools of the world, but by clean-cut middle-class and working class vets, men of military experience, who know something about how to shoot and how to organize."</div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Part Four: a Few Arrows</b></div><div>128: "It takes great efforts and much good luck to be able to surpass the dirty ape and rat inside us all. Most of mankind never left the regime of deformity, and it's no surprise that this morass is returning. It's just a reversion to the norm." </div><div><br /></div><div>128ff: On how the Renaissance "ended up setting the stage for our trash-world." First the vital part of mankind, the warlord, the monarch, and "the very success of these men in securing the conditions of life and comfort for the rest of the community." "Second, the ascent, within this peacetime, of the priest, the shaman, the schemer, and the matriarch, which slowly usurp power away from the brotherhoods of young men and their captains." <b>See Spinoza's explanation of the corruption of the Hebrew Republic, which lost power to a priestly caste.</b> "But it often happens that the men of power become decadent and let the state drift into the hands of those who can't rule--and who start to resent them for this abdication. Women become also very aggressive, once real and relaxed manhood atrophies."</div><div><br /></div><div>130: "And in the West, whose special fate has been confused for History or Progress of the entire species, this development has taken place through the promotion of logos or reason and all the manifestations of this: the adulation of empty words, of legalism as a guide for social and political life, of the cult of science that is very far from real science."</div><div><br /></div><div>130: "The modern socialisms, the expansion of the power of the state that squashes all initiative and all life, the hypocrisy of all political life in our time--all of this is to be attributed to the participation of women in political life... The state we live in is as repressive as any oriental tyranny. But its hypocrisy is that <b>it hides its force under the delusion of egalitarian ideals and legalistic procedures inconsistently applied.</b> It is not women actually being free, but their 'legal freedom,' a practical fiction, being used by a hidden power to oppress, to dispossess, to intimidate and extort. It took one hundred years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization." <b>[Interesting distinction here--if the reader is able to get past the mysogyny here--that it's not "women in political life" <i>per se</i> that is the problem, rather it's the behind-the-scenes power structure with all its arbitrary power.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>131ff: On the transition of Western power from an increasingly decadent nobility to a banker/merchant/capitalist class in the 18th century:</b> "The loss of respect in general marks the modern age since 1800 or so: the loss of respect in authority, for example, that came when industrialists and bankers replaced the warrior nobility." <b>On Napoleon: "This is why Napoleon was such an enigma for so many: he represented a man out of time, something completely unexpected in the age of middle class mediocrity and hypocritical 'democracy'</b> that was just then coming about. ... Napoleon was an escape from the domination of the bugman that was just then beginning to take hold of the nations."</div><div><br /></div><div>133ff: On the many-sided/many-fronted nature of the fight now; "...any answer must be on multiple fronts, and each one calls for a different strategy and different type of talent and man..." On the idea that you may find yourself allied with people you wouldn't otherwise; Also on the idea that you may need to stay out of the public, don't be a sucker/patsy and show up to a rally and be facial-recognitioned by the state; "know what is possible in the normie political sphere."</div><div><br /></div><div>135: Intriguing take here the "evils" of suburbs: "I don't see any evidence that the tax base of America moved to the suburbs by choice. <b>Their inner cities were taken away from them not, as is imagined, by blacks, but by the politicians--and their handlers--who found it more profitable to replace middle class citizens with an underclass. The space to which they've been segregated and to which they have to 'commute' is I think a form of absolute hell to raise children in, especially boys. There is no freedom of motion except to regimented activities, they are always watched by caretakers of some kind.</b> The places are of incredible ugliness, which takes away also from the will to discover new things at all. There are no nooks and corners where boys can form gangs, be away from prying eyes of parents and others, and have the feeling that they are exploring and owning territory, as there is in the city and in the countryside. <b>America has successfully portioned off its historical population, its rightful citizens, and its tax base, in work camps and dormitories.</b> That is what the modern American 'city' is: an economic zone arranged much like a work-camp, or concentration-camp if you want."</div><div><br /></div><div>136: "I think the reason the suburbs are hateful to the raising of boys is also the reason they are most objectionable in general, namely that while in the countryside or the city a restive population would be able to hold their territory and challenge a power should the need arise, such a thing is impossible in the suburbs. Suburbs are living arrangement[s] for slaves and subjects."</div><div><div><br /></div><div>136: On "social justice": "...just look at them during the Occupy rallies, hoping to siphon off <i>respect</i>. The <i>need</i> to be <i>respected</i> is [a] sign of [a] very low and wormlike condition of spirit. The tantrums of the coddled and domesticated, of no force... No force behind it, just the opinions of the left-over, the prattling of guilt and begging: <b>not even the Marxist engine of the worker. What worker? They have contempt for the worker."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>138ff: Various scenarios for the USA; breakup/secession, military rule; various comments here on the nature of the USA's military.</div><div><br /></div><div>141: "'Representative democracy' plus a bureaucratic state is often criticized by conservatives as destructive of personal freedom and initiative, which it is; but given that most people who go into public life are poor and weak-minded, it also just means indirect rule by spooks, oligarchs, and whatever foreign nation or interest can funnel more money or influence or threat here or there."</div><div><br /></div><div>142ff: Random musings here on the USA's intelligence services; why we as a culture aren't very good at "intelligence": "Full of Mormons and various cripplettes who put on a high Wasp manner, full also of soccer moms and neuters, the intelligence services are in fact quite incompetent, despite their considerable power." "But it's without a doubt that they've tried to get into the 'meme' business, and had units dedicated to this kind of visual propaganda, especially during the last election. We all saw their efforts and we laughed. I think the biggest threat the right presented to this system came from something like 4chan, which showed it can be an intelligence agency of its own, and far superior to what the formal spooks could do. How they located obscure objects, places, and people from photos is something that formally-trained agents couldn't normally do. The memes put a spike of fear in the hearts of all the constipated spooks." <b>[I remember the very first time I heard about 4chan, it was during the "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetHistorian/comments/e9gnx9/comment/faiz339/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3" target="_blank">bike lock guy</a>" controversy; heh, this was also when I learned the expression "weaponized autism" for the first time. Good times.]</b> </div><div><br /></div><div>144ff: On public movements that work vs those that don't: "Above all I believe that any public movement will be most effective if it is not political at all, and remains 'implicit.'" "It's without a doubt that any public organization will be infiltrated by feds, hostiles, and agents provocateurs, and therefore it's necessary to avoid and condemn any imagery or message of violence, and to ostracize people who exhibit tendencies in that direction or who try to convince others to idiotic 'action.'"</div><div><br /></div><div>146: "The purpose of all such 'political action' should be the same as memetic samizdat, which is to make the enemy look ridiculous. You must show them for what they are, which is, dour, old, sclerotic, ugly, pedantic."</div><div><br /></div><div>147: "Remember that they still own many of the cities and the police forces in these cities, which can be induced to act illegally and to put you in danger; for this reason, and many others, public rallies announced well ahead of time are totally useless, as are public 'policy' speeches and other such wankery. You must of course avoid all violence and all talk of violence as well, and not fall into the trap they want you to fall into."</div><div><br /></div><div>148: "There won't be any 'beta revolution,' and betas are unreliable, because they can be easily bought off with a girlfriend, or even a shrew wife and the parody of a good domestic life. I've seen many men, intelligent and well educated, but weak in their core and much too concerned with women, who gave up all higher aspirations once a half-decent girl came along."</div><div><br /></div><div>150: "Many are domestic animals and happy that way. I speak instead to the men who feel stifled by this bug world."</div><div><br /></div><div>150: "People at all times try to domesticate each other. Language is used to clobber and deceive others into submission and domestication. Ideas and arguments and stories are manufactured for the same. The modern world is no different in this regard from any wretched tribal society."</div><div><br /></div><div>151: "The left realizes they look weak and lame--because they are. They know they have nothing to offer youth but submission and lectures. They know they're unsexy and staid. If indeed young leftist men will start lifting and worshiping beauty, they will be forced to leave the left."</div><div><br /></div><div>152: "I have nothing to say to the frivolous people who have found themselves, maybe bewildered, in positions of influence in media or government, or to the many superfluous who follow them. In the next hundred years and even before, barbaric piratical brotherhoods will wipe away this corrupt civilization, as they did at the end of the Bronze Age."</div><div><br /></div><div>154ff: The book finishes with a call to action to a brotherhood, a small brotherhood of men, who will descend into the vices of clown world and use it against itself.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>To Read:</b> </div><div>Anna Comnena: <i>The Alexiad</i></div><div>Anatoly Fomenko: <i>The Issue with Chronology</i></div><div>Anatoly Fomenko: <i>The Issue with Antiquity</i><br /></div><div>Anatoly Fomenko: <i>History: Fiction or Science?</i><br /></div><div>Rene Guenon: <i>The Crisis of the Modern World</i></div><div>Rene Guenon: <i>Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines</i><br /></div><div>Julius Evola: <i>Revolt Against the Modern World</i></div><div>Julius Evola: <i>Metaphysics of War</i><br /></div><div>Louis-Ferdinand Céline: <i>Journey to the End of the Night</i> <br /></div><div>Charles Oman: <i>Studies In The Napoleonic Wars</i></div><div>Luis de Camoes: <i>Lusiad</i> (poetry)</div></div><div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-84641090134488088172024-02-25T14:29:00.000-08:002024-02-25T16:01:25.981-08:00Merchants of Grain by Dan Norman<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">[Recommended for investing geeks and students of power structures. Everyone else can take a pass.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Certain industries or companies need to be "visible" and in the public eye. See, for example, story stocks like Nvidia, or branded consumer products companies (which require name recognition and habit formation in order to sell product), or any company run by a celebrity CEO. Think of this as one level of visibility.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Note also: any publicly traded company--even if it has a name or a CEO nobody's ever heard of--must file financial reports and other filings. To have access to public equity markets and have your stock trade on an exchange, your company has to "come in and register" (to borrow the phrase from incompetent SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler), and this means putting a lot of information about your business out in the open. Now anybody can look at your filings, see your profitability metrics, see who your managers and directors and large shareholders are, and so on. Think of this as another level of visibility. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Now, consider a level of <i>in</i>visibility: the privately-held or family-owned company, that never files SEC filings, <i>that nobody knows anything about</i>. And until recently, that was the grain industry: largely unknown multinational entities, storing, processing and transporting billions of dollars of grains of all types, taking it from where it's grown to wherever there's a market to buy it. The secrecy of this industry even enabled these companies to broker, quietly, huge grain deals between enemy governments. And get rich doing it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Think about an analogy in politics. Obviously we can all "see" a political candidate and we typically assume, wrongly, that he's the power center--after all, he's the candidate, right? But what about the power structure <i>behind</i> the candidate? Who's doing the funding, who has chits on the candidate for extracting favors and favorable policy decisions down the road once he's in office? And then who's behind <i>those people</i> who you <i>never</i> see? </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It gets you to think deeply about power, and the best kind of power is the <i>behind</i>-the-behind-the-scenes power <i>that nobody even thinks about</i>, much less sees.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Merchants of Grain</i> also gets you thinking about where the real money is in an industry. Hint: it isn't actually in producing the commodity itself! Rather, it's in distribution, storage, transport, reselling and brokerage--all of which are business models based on earning spreads, commissions or rents (or all three!) off of someone else's asset. Not only is this business less asset-intensive, it's also more mobile: it can be moved to where the tax and regulatory burden is mildest, and it can't be seized quite as easily by, say, an adversarial nation-state (at least not in the same way fixed assets like land, factories or natural resources can be). </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Another insight: it's striking to think of the sheer quantity of slack in global agriculture markets. For example in the very brief period between 1971 and 1975, global trade in various grains grew by some 50%, (from 114 million tons to 157 million tons a year), most of it covered by new capacity and production just in the United States! Imagine the idea that there can be that much slack capacity, in the United States alone, <i>built up over just four or five growing seasons</i>. It makes you consider the astounding amount of slack agricultural capacity likely available planetwide.</div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Finally, think of grain as an instrument of geopolitical power, even as an instrument of geopolitical dependency. Believe me, the USA exercised this power on quite a number of countries over the course of the 20th century. See for example how Iran gave away much of its agricultural sovereignty thanks to its elites engaging in grain dealings with the USA at the expense of Iran's domestic farmers. We all think of oil and the US petrodollar system as devices of global hegemony, but in many ways grain is an even more foundational resource than oil, or even money. Grain--either eaten directly or as a critical input for the meat industry--is the substrate for the world's entire food system. The author touches on this theme but could have gone much deeper into its implications. It might have made for a more interesting book. </div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[As usual, a friendly warning to skip the rest of this post, which is just a long collection of my notes and takeaways from the book. Don't even bother to skim the bold parts, life is short and there's a lot to do!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Introduction:</b> </div><div dir="auto">viiff: On new public awareness of the key five grain companies, thanks to the so-called "Great Grain Robbery," the controversial 1972 sale of American grain to the Soviet Union. The author discovers that there's no political or economic history of grain companies, grain routes, grain traders; any grain industry-related literature he finds all seems to focus on "countries and their rulers, rather than on the world and its resources."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">x: Note how Cargill handles a congressional subcommittee by bringing in row after row of "experts" to defend the industry and accuse the subcommittee of smearing the grain industry. The hearings were quickly postponed indefinitely</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xff: On the value of secrecy and discretion in the grain industry; a code of secrecy; one executive tells the author "Those Cargill boys are <i>really</i> secretive!" Also Bunge's in-house historian refused to speak to him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xii: Families involved: the Fribourg family, the Hirsch family, the Born family, the Louis-Dreyfus family, the André family, also the Cargill and MacMillan families.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Glenas, Inc., of Panama</b></div><div dir="auto">1ff: On needing discreet, anonymous access to shipping; chartering a ship but not saying who the client is. [Interesting as I'm learning more about shipping these days how this was a much more shadowy industry back then, now the major shipping companies are publicly traded as well, although there is also still today a "gray" shipping industry around the edges.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2: A "lakes fitted" vessel meaning one that goes through the USA's and Canada's Great Lakes region and thus gets to the wheat ports in Minnesota, Thunder Bay, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4: On how middlemen need to be secret: they are also often blamed when there's a scarcity, people steal from their granaries, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: Cargill, Continental, Bunge were all privately held in the 1970s, they also diversified into banking, shipping, real estate, hotels, mining, milling flour, feed processing and commodity brokerage. in the 1970s Bunge already had 50,000 employees. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5ff: [Interesting here also to think about where the power is, a lot of these major international companies had their assets seized by various countries in Latin America and the Soviet Union and elsewhere; it turns out that actually growing grain or pulling oil out of the ground is less valuable than making sure that grain or oil (or whatever commodity) is transported to where it is needed and also brokered appropriately. (!) This is a much more asset-light industry, whereas owning the land, farming it and <i>producing</i> the commodity is asset-intensive and not as good a business (and can easily be seized). <b>Farmland is more easily taken because it's fixed, unlike transport and brokerage assets! It's not like you can sail that land to another more friendly jurisdiction, or move your brokering business elsewhere.] </b>Also note this structural advantage as well: "Farmers take the risks of falling prices, bad weather, and governmental policies... the grain companies, one stage removed from the production process, can make money whether prices are rising or falling."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6ff: The key grain companies tended to stay either private or largely controlled by family members, so you didn't always have the same kinds of agency problems that plague modern publicly-traded corporations, where ownership has to hire management with potentially different priorities. <b>Also many of the best-run family-owned enterprises typically operate on a multi-generational or even centuries-long time horizon.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9ff: On US donations of grain as a mechanism of soft power, they only gave it to "friendly" nations.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10ff: Interesting stats here on Soviet agriculture: 37 million workers or 1/3 of the Soviet labor force was still involved in agriculture as recently as 1972, (!) they went through the ag-to-industry labor market transition in the 1970s that the United States went through in the first half of the 20th century. "The shortcomings of the Soviet food and agriculture system posed awkward strategic and political questions." The Soviet Union also bought large amounts of grain in 1972, causing grain hoarding all over the world, the author likens the price increase of grain then to the quadrupling of oil prices by OPEC in 1973. [Interesting since the 2020 pandemic we've seen prices of beef, pork, chicken increase at rates similar to the early seventies.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>13ff: [Seems like the author doesn't know or notice that "the cure for high prices is high prices": he's talking here about the belief in the United States that food supplies were virtually infinite and how this belief was shattered in the 1970s somehow. But obviously we're feeding our population quite competently today, 50 years later, when our population is more than 50% higher and we are actually using <i>less</i> farmland! Note that an increase in prices is an important signal, <i>it signals the market to produce more of that thing</i>. These are second-order ways of thinking about a problem that's typically thought of on the first order.</b>]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19ff: In 1975 the Soviet bought some 12 million tons of North American grain from Canada, amounts much larger than the so-called "Great Grain Robbery" of 1972. A lot of people in the US were pissed, and the longshoreman's union announced that it would boycott loading grain bound for Russia; people were concerned about food prices going higher during an already inflationary period. The CIA also worked out that Soviet grain harvests during this period were calamitously poor. Other departments of the US government--despite having teams of people to estimate this stuff--had no idea how bad it was there.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22ff: Also striking here was the question whether there should be some sort of supra-governmental or bureaucratic system to allocate grain internationally, should there be stockpiles kept; and also the notion that maybe America's food supplies weren't as boundless as they were assumed to be.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Bread and Dynasties</b></div><div dir="auto">[This chapter goes back into the past to explore the growth and development of grain over the centuries in Europe]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">25ff: Odessa as a key wheat port in the Black Sea, shipping a surplus from the manors/estates of Southern Russia to the West, unprocessed because there were no grain processing plants in the Odessa region.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">26: "To Socrates, one mark of a statesman was the knowledge of how much wheat was needed to feed the population of Athens."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27: By the 1700s and 1800s there were remarkable feats of transport to handle moving grain around Europe to combat recurring famines; the agriculture market became diversified and internationalized. Note that most of the early trading across Europe was initially for luxuries for the rich: chocolate, coffee, tea, spices, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27: On the democratization of bread eating by 1800, something that only the elites ate a century before. <b>[Note here that the irony of bleaching and finely milling flour actually removes nutrients, the other thing that's interesting is many of the foods eaten by the peasant class such as porridge, lentils, chickpeas, acorn flour, etc., are ironically more healthy than hyper-processed white flour! Extremely ironic.]</b> "By 1800, however, bread eating was on its way to being democratized... Bread was a staple food for the working man and his family, detached as he was from his old village or farm. Workers in Paris, London, and Manchester in 1800 paid half their wages for bread alone. Eating bread was a badge of attainment and social status." <b>[This section here is a bit of a word salad, as the author is saying that bread eating is "democratized" yet it's still a component of status seeking. One heuristic we can possibly take away here: is that if you status-seek through your diet you will eat a worse diet! Eat like a peasant.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">28: Bread eating had spread across all elements of society by the late 1700s, leading to an international cereal trade in the 19th century.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">29ff: On the 1846 repeal of the protectionist corn laws in England, a collection of tariffs that protected farmers and landed aristocrats domestically, but harmed everyone else via higher food prices. Also note the Irish Famine of 1844. Prime minister Robert Peel, importing American grain as a relief measure for Ireland, was denounced because of depressed grain prices: "Peel's Brimstone."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">30: Interesting comment here. "But Parliament, with its stroke of repeal [of the protectionist "Corn Laws" in 1845], had changed the world. Repeal of the protectionist system had opened England to the wheat of all the world, created incentives for the settlement of vast territories across the oceans, and established the conditions for modern international trade, with new sea routes and modern trading empires." Is this actually true? And can it be that an island nation that's unable to feed itself creates this incredible marketplace indirectly just by opening itself up to importing grain and foodstuffs? </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">34ff: Various innovations in the grain industry since the mid 1800s: mechanization of flour mills, starting with windmills, later water power, and then steam; the steam-operated bucket lift invented in the United States in 1843; rodent-proof and weatherproof concrete storage silos, which replaced wooden warehouses; new canal and railroad systems which opened up new farming territory; iron-hulled ships and modernized grain ports in the late 1800s, which made transport costs decline so that distance became a minor factor in the cost of wheat; new farming machinery and then the transatlantic cable in the 1860s, which let suppliers and producers exchange information; in 1883 the development of the first grain futures, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36: United States grain shipments to England were negligible until the Civil War, but by 1874 US grain overtook Russia's shipments to England; note also with the 1873 opening of the Suez Canal grain could more easily arrive from India to Europe; also Indian grain varieties were used and adapted to Canada which had a short growing season--interestingly, just like the between-monsoon seasons of India. See also development of farming in the southern hemisphere: Australia, Chile, Argentina, etc., which diversified international grain supplies. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">37ff: The background of the Bunge family: starting out in Sweden during the reign of King Gustavus, then emigrating to the Netherlands and (some of the family) also to Buenos Aires, on how the company earned the nickname "the octopus"; also one of the Bunge family members had a role in extracting resources out of the Belgian Congo under "murky" circumstances, as the author words it. Also see this quote from Argentina: "Bunge gives the farmer his credit, sells him his seed, and buys his grain. And when the crops are in, Bunge sells the farmer the rope to hang himself."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Grain Barons</b></div><div dir="auto">42ff: Development of the grain industry in the United States, grain mills and grain elevators led to concentration of wealth among robber-baron type capitalists during the 19th century, note also California became dependent on the English grain market: see California #1, one of the standard varieties of grain traded in Liverpool in the 1880s, a striking feat of international commerce in that era. Note also the California position as a grain exporter was short-lived: by the 1890s most of the regions farmland began a conversion to other crops, basically California grain growing was displaced by the Midwest; note also prairie land was quickly adaptable to farming compared to forested East Coast land; note also the development of many labor-saving machines to reduce labor hours needed for farming.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48ff Minneapolis in the 1860s and the competition between the Pillsburys and the Washburns, both of which began milling businesses.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49ff: Various discussions here of milling technology and developments, based on different types of grain for different regions as well as different requirements in the milling plant to separate the bran from the wheat. Also Minneapolis flour specifically had a higher gluten content, which meant more loaves of bread per pound of flour, as well as bread that stayed fresh longer.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">51ff: On the dangers of flour mills: see the 1878 mill explosion at the Washburn Mill in Minneapolis, technology on milling processes as well as ventilation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">52ff: Formation of buyers' cartels in Minneapolis to control distribution and extract more value from the milling process and control grading and sometimes pricing of grain.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">53ff: Background on Will Cargill and Frank Peavey, who controlled grain elevators in this region, collecting and shipping farmers' grain; note that almost nothing is known about Frank Peavey and his history. Peavey and his development of the concrete grain silo in 1899, "Peavey's folly"; by his death in 1901 he had a huge enterprise across the United States, owning steamships, interests in railroads, banking, land, even a piano company, "the grain elevator king of the world."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57ff: The creation in 1848 of the Chicago Board of Trade: on speculation and market manipulation during the Civil War; the first big corner in 1888, when B.P. Hutchinson used futures during a poor global harvest that year; see also Joseph Leiter's failed corner in 1897; also the benefits and drawbacks of a futures market: clear prices that everyone could see, also the ability to sell grain at different times throughout the year, to also have commitments for delivering or purchasing crops in advance, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">61: On North America becoming a source of food at crucial times, when harvests failed or during the Crimean War in 1854, or during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, etc; and also that geopolitical events in Europe could also affect American agricultural markets and farmer prosperity.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Living by Their Wits</b></div><div dir="auto">64ff: Early grain merchants like the Fribourgs, handling all the volatility that happened during the 1920s with war, inflation, depression, the dust bowl, etc. See also changes due to World War I, which took Russia out of the running as a large wheat producer, while also seeing India start to consume its own wheat crop and become less important as a supplier to Europe. "Neither country's wheat was ever again a significant part of Europe's food supply." The growth of the Western hemisphere as a primary source of grain for Europe.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>65ff: [Interesting aside here on wheat prices per bushel: there's a comment from the author about how US wheat went to an "unprecedented" price of $3.17 per bushel in may 1917, right after the US declared war on Germany. What's shocking, though, is the price of wheat right now is $6.98 per bushel, down from $9.18 a year ago. The idea that the price of wheat after <i>a century of inflation</i> could still be so low is literally astounding. Note also that here on page 76 the lows for grain prices were 32 cents to 50 cents a bushel in 1932.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>67ff: [Interesting comments here on another grain as yet another industry that makes a ton of money during war, note this quote from a European grain merchant: "The Allies bought huge quantities--and there were no taxes, good margins and small expenses!" War doesn't only make arms merchants rich...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">74ff: Also the 1929 market crash also screwed up the wheat market: per the author "the grain trade was never the same again." A lot of smaller trading firms were blown up and industry consolidated among a few large companies that survived. Likewise very similar thing happened in farming as well, the industry consolidated down as many small farms failed.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76: Note the different policies that different countries use to protect their wheat markets: how France would raise or cut tariffs depending on the market; Italy had a specific policy of food independence, using tariffs, import quotas and propaganda. The US in the 1920s didn't really have any policies at all to deal with changes in global agriculture markets. [Note however once Smoot-Hawlyy tariffs were passed in 1930, the USA began evolving into what is today one of the most protected and babied ag markets of all]. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>77: Interesting factoid here where Japan wanted to reduce its exposure to wheat imports for noodles, and in 1932 they began to increase domestic reproduction: in 3 years they increased by 60% and achieved self-sufficiency. The author then says "These phenomenally successful food production campaigns tend to be forgotten amid today's talk that the world is running out of food."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">78: The Depression ushered in a period of tremendous government intervention in the grain industry, as well as many others. "The United States came out of the 1930s conditioned to farm price supports, wheat export subsidies, and farm programs that regulated the amount of acreage planted to certain crops."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">81: The 1930s essentially oligopolized every segment of the grain industry: farming, distribution, transport, storage, to trading, commodity market activity.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">82ff: Cargill Corp has succession problems: the founder died in 1909 and his son made some ill-advised "diworseifications." Control of the company essentially passed to a son in law of the MacMillan family, and away from Will Cargill's son William. John McMillan seen as a sound, sober and stubborn man. They managed to keep the company alive and shepherd it through a brush with near-bankruptcy in the years 1909-1916.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">86: Another nugget here: during the Spanish Civil War in the mid-1930s, the Fribourgs' agents sold food to the Republican side. One way to think about food is to think of it as a type of arms, see the idea from Napoleon that an army travels on its stomach.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">87: Also the Louis Dreyfus firm had passed on from Leopold Louis-Dreyfus to his sons Louis and Charles Louis-Dreyfus in the early 1900s; the firm had already diversified vertically into transport boats and ships out of Odessa, and then it started making real money with transport, not carrying just grain but other types of cargo.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">88: There is a crescendo of grain buying from Germany in the winter of 1937, and when Germany invaded France the Fribourg family, Jews understandably concerned about their safety, drove to the Spanish border and walked across. [The reader can't help but imagine sound of music type scene here]. They then boarded a freighter owned by the company at Lisbon and sailed to the Dominican Republic, then months later entered the US.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Rendezvous at Château Laurier</b></div><div dir="auto">92ff "The United States emerged from World War II as the preeminent grain power of the world." [Just like with their industrial companies.] "The United States supplied half the world wheat trade from 1945 to 1949." But also during this period the key grain companies were largely under government directions so it was kind of like public utility, a lot less swashbuckling than in earlier days.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">95: Anecdote here on the government in Argentina, which was acquiring cheap grain from its own farmers and selling it at heavily marked-up prices in Europe in the late 1940s; also the Argentine government was meddling in the industry overall, which was making life difficult for Bunge Corp.'s business there, thus the company began to turn towards Brazil and the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">97: In the late 1940s the grain market started to have surpluses every year, margins got a lot thinner up and down the industry, it lost its pre-war glamour.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">98: On the post-World War II era of constant surpluses, note that acreage used for feed was no longer necessary in the "tractor era," this freed up millions of acres of grain land, also corn yields increased massively with hybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers: yields per acre doubled from 50 bushels to 100 bushels from the 1940s to the 1960s. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">99ff: Note also the discovery of soybeans as a miracle crop for protein which would help increase and speed up the weight gain process for cattle, hogs and poultry. Soybeans also grew well in the United States; note also the US exported a lot of its dietary habits to the rest of the world, e.g., bread and much more meat to Asians.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">100ff: 1954: Congress passes Public Law 480, which created a permanent food aid program for "humanitarian" reasons (at least ostensibly), this helped enrich the farm belt, it did actually feed countries under famine conditions from time to time, it also disposed of constant US grain surpluses; something like one bushel of wheat out of every four and one bushel of rice out of every five ended up going abroad under this program in its first years. Typically the way it worked was foreign governments would get authorization from the US government to purchase (with American loans) quantities of American farm commodities, the foreigners handled the transaction but payment went from the US Treasury to the exporters.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">103ff: 1962: The Middents Plan, this changed the ag subsidy system and paid money directly to farmers for planting less acreage, replacing the system that caused price supports at prices that made American grain uncompetitive internationally, this was nicknamed "Cargill's Bill."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105ff: On Soviet economic isolation and its desire to be self-sufficient between the wars and after World War II; note this quote from Yugoslavian communist politician Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo, "who had told American officials in Washington in the late 1940s that his countrymen would rather eat grass than accept help from the West with strings attached." See also the Soviet Union opening the Siberian steppes to agriculture, a risky venture. Their wheat output grew significantly but they were still importing food even during the 1960s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">109ff: Now discussing the phone call to Patrick Mayhew from Russia: Mayhew was working for a grain broker in London and his client was the American company Peavey. At the same time Russia used Louis-Dreyfus as an agent to purchase 200,000 tons of Canadian wheat. Later meetings in Ottawa ultimately resulted in Canada announcing a sale of 6.8 million tons of wheat to the Soviet Union at a price of nearly $500 million, "a watershed in the history of the post-war grain trade... Khrushchev was doing what other rich countries like Japan were doing: covering the [harvest] deficit with imports... Henceforth, the Soviet Union would be the 'X factor' in world grain markets."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">111ff: The US government was nonplussed with the Canada deal with Russia. "A billion bushels of unsold grain were being stored in American stocks" when the Canadian announcement came out. Also note that this was less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">113: Kennedy finally wakes up and sees this is an opportunity to broaden a relationship between the US and Russia and lessen tensions. Kennedy authorizes up to 4 million tons of wheat and flour to be sold to Russia in 1963.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">114ff: On Michel Fribourg, son of Jules Fribourg who died in 1944; On Michel coming out of his shell in New York City, using "divide and rule" to control management; aloof, shy and retiring but also a risk-taker who was more similar to his father than many initially had thought.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">119: Khrushchev was actually harmed politically by these grain purchases and he never mentioned anything about these transactions in his memoirs.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: "Cram It Down Their Throats"</b></div><div dir="auto">[This chapter is all over the place, covering different regions, different issues, there's no real central thread]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">120: The [unfortunately named] Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture, talking about the 1972 grain sale to Russia: "This is by all odds the greatest grain transaction in the history of the world. And it is certainly the greatest for us."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">120ff: After 1963 and 1964 there were no more Russian buys of American grains on a meaningful level until 1972. 1972's trade was called the Great Grain Robbery, and there was likely significant collusion between the US government, Russia and the various companies involved.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">123ff: The US would start dumping grain abroad in order to get it offshore and also to avoid needing to store all the unsold surpluses, <i>and</i> to get more foreign exchange into the US; the author gives an example of what happened in Iran to illustrate: there, both the US and Russia dumped food inputs like sunflower oil (in Russia's case) and soybean oil (in the USA's case). </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">127ff Note also that the United States never sells anything without strings attached, and in the case of Iran they sold grain to Iran to buyers who would set up dairy and poultry operations... that would lead to demand for still <i>more</i> grain. It also changed some of the dietary habits of the Iranians in the 1960s and 1970s and ultimately Iran "surrendered to the United States a good deal of its agricultural sovereignty." Iran was also expected to buy farm equipment and breeding animals. "The sooner John Deere company establishes itself in Iran, the sooner it will control much of the needed agricultural projects." <b>[What's missing here is a discussion of <i>why</i> this happens. <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/j-is-for-junk-economics-by-michael.html" target="_blank">Michael Hudson discusses bluntly in his book: this is the nature of how the US controls other countries via client oligarchies</a> in those countries who enrich themselves at the expense of their own people.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">130ff: The European common market develops CAP, a common agricultural policy: it had high duties for Canadian and American grain, involved price supports for European farmers and would limit European surpluses; note however that Europe became much wealthier in the 1960s thus their meat and poultry consumption required far more grain and soybeans. Plus the US was selling plenty of ag commodities to them anyway. Note also European climates were unsuitable for growing soybeans and thus this important source of vegetable protein for animals had to come from imports.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">134: "Farm surpluses tended to occur in rich, industrial nations, where farmers had powerful, well-organized lobbies, rather than in developing countries where farmers usually were weak and underrepresented."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">136: [As counterintuitive as the idea of paying farmers to not plant crops may sound, it's actually quite brilliant: you keep prices high--but not too high--in the marketplace so the economics makes sense for everyone, and then you have built in flex capacity in case there's a poor harvest because you've paid farmers to keep some land fallow; thus you can withdraw payment for that land and farmers will naturally plant it; automatic and adjustable protection from too much or too little of that crop.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">139ff: Now we're transitioning the chapter over to Russia and their grain purchases in 1971, repeating what happened in 1964; disputes with the longshoreman unions about shipping to Moscow, conflicts over the 50/50 rule that at least half of the grain had to be shipped on American flagged ships, etc. Here the Russians were looking for feed for livestock, the Soviet Union had bumper grain crops in 1970 and 1971 but still bought half a billion dollars worth of grain. "If they bought that much in good harvest years, what would happen when the inevitable occurred--when Russian harvests failed?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">146ff: Nixon Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz; courting controversy with an interview in the <i>Washington Post</i> where he said farmers should "adapt or die"; this is a cold reference to a decline in smaller ag operations across the country as more efficient commercial farmers started to dominate. <b>[Interesting how agriculture itself begins to consolidate and oligopolize, just as the upstream industries did]</b>; Note the author can't even hide his dislike for Earl Butz, he sees him as a standard "meanie" conservative. "Butz's heart did not bleed for consumers either at home or abroad. He wanted higher prices for U.S. farm products."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>148: [There's an offhand reference here to Clarence Palmby, then-Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, who quit the federal government to go work for Continental, the author doesn't state this outright but this is a good example of the standard "revolving door phenomenon" that leads to regulatory capture. Today we see increasingly blatant examples between the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical regulators.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">149ff: 1972: Russia makes a rather sudden request to buy 4 million tons of wheat and 3 million tons of corn, also durum as well as other commodities: tremendous amounts of grain; the author calls it "the most momentous events in post war agricultural history" and it would disrupt prices all over the United States and the world. When all was said and done the total commitments were 11.85 million tons of grain, a third of what the US normally sold to <i>all</i> countries in a single year--and then there was still more buying after that (!) as the Russian harvest deteriorated further. Also the scale of this was so large that shipping became a problem, Continental's shipping subsidiary was caught short on shipping capacity because of all the grain chartering.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">153ff: Interesting comments here on how the CIA knew all about this stuff while it was happening, they knew about it long before the US farm community, and they may have even leaked some information to the media about it. The CIA learned this directly from the grain companies, as it kept in close touch with all the grain houses and with merchants returning from abroad. Per the author: "There was, in fact, a steady interchange between the agency and officials in <i>dozens</i> of multinational companies, whose information about all the most vital developments affecting the economies of countries often was far more accurate and complete than that of any government agencies. To the CIA, the multinationals were an informational gold mine." <b>[Also extremely interesting to think about the implications here, if the CIA could be this well-connected with the grain industry back then, why would anyone doubt that they would be as well or even better connected inside any important industry today? Obviously I'm thinking of the key social media and internet hubs and major media companies that the CIA allegedly infiltrated during the pandemic. It's just another lever of power and control; of course a government is going to put it to use.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">155ff: While this tremendous grain export to Russia was being organized, there was "a new era of resource scarcity" per the author: droughts in Africa in 1971 and 1972, rice crop failure in Korea and elsewhere in Asia, a decline in the anchovy catch off Peru, a devaluation of the dollar which made US grain even more attractive to foreigners, and then the Russians making this huge buy. Note how once word spread about the Great Grain Robbery, tie-ups occurred in freight trains, traffic jams occurred in ports; Ultimately the US managed to unload 2/3 of its wheat surplus/stores in just a year. <b>[It's interesting: this looks just like any other commodity cycle in the sense that the demand growth was visible and predictable but capacity increases come in quanta, in step functions, and these capacity increases become available only with a lag; thus when there's a demand shock, of course the price of that commodity may go up quite a lot very quickly; and then the price rise <i>itself</i> drives panic buying which makes the price go up still more, etc.]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">157ff: Grain prices now were above the USA support prices; this was on some level great for American farms, but also it was one of the components of the inflation that accelerated in the 1970s; see also Nixon putting on wage and price freezes in 1971 right before his reelection; then letting them lapse and watching the CPI rise to some 10%, and then Nixon reimposed price controls, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>158: [You see yet another example of a commodity cycle here where beef prices start going up, then keep going up and then the cattlemen and the packing houses respond by holding back supply hoping for even <i>higher</i> prices, which drives higher prices, so on the supply side you can also get a recursive function.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>158: [Also an interesting blurb here about how in 1974 there was more grass-fed beef sold as a result of higher corn/feed prices, but the author here operates under a presumption that corn-fed steaks were juicier, more marbled, considered much higher quality, while grass-fed steaks were considered lower quality. Intriguing how things change...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>158: [Yet another aspect of recursion: high corn prices affected the price of pork in idiosyncratic ways, once corn got so expensive farmers would sell the grain rather than feed it to their hogs, then they would butcher the hogs and take them to the market and this actually may lower prices in the short run as all that meat comes to market. But later since there were fewer sows and fewer new litters the <i>capacity</i> of the market was depleted, thus pork prices skyrocketed <i>much</i> higher a year or so later. Fascinating. Note also from the perspective of a consumer: there's a sort of a cheat code here in that their will often be unusual or idiosyncratic movements in prices in different directions of different foods. Thus the empowered consumer will adjust his or her protein intake accordingly to be both efficient with spending and also to eat healthily.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">160: "For the grain companies, this was an embarrassing moment to be earning unprecedented profits." You see some striking moves here in companies; earnings, Cargill earned $19 million in 1970 to, but then earned $150 million in 1973 (!) <b>[This is an astounding increase for an ag company and it shows what kinds of investment leverage you can get owning these types of companies when the price of their underlying commodity moves.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: "Big Grain"</b></div><div dir="auto">161: On the grain industry's invisibility: <b>Cargill boasting that "99 per cent of our customers have never heard of us."</b> Fribourg at Continental would "rather lose a million dollars than get his name in the papers."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>162ff: The Bunge/Born grandsons Jorge and Juan Born were captured/abducted by student Peronistas in Argentina, 1974. Exchanges of gunfire, a whole abduction, Latin American style. After this Bunge became even more secretive. Bunge ends up paying off the Montoneros some $60m (a tremendous sum in those days, the author equates it to 1/3 of Argentina's defense budget at the time), also it revealed a lot about the inside politics and power of Bunge within the government and the establishment in Argentina.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">165ff: On the extensive diversification of many of these big grain companies, note also that from the mid-1950s to 1972 the grain industry wasn't that good a business; most of these companies moved into more vertical and horizontal activities. Also there was more and more government regulation of the grain industry over this time period.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>167ff: [One thing that's a little bit sad is how all these grain companies got suckered into the diversification fad of the 1970s, just like so many other corporation. Super example here: Cargill buying an insurance firm, two steel companies, etc. Even the greatest families and greatest entrepreneurs see their companies eventually being led around by management consultants!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">172ff: Discussion of Cargill's evolution into other food commodities like tapioca/cassava or sugar, and then making a larger point about these types of more fruitful, lateral diversifications of the key dominant grain companies. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>175: [One interesting nuance here is where you can substitute ingredients for feed, and a marketplace like Europe doesn't have duties on, say, tapioca/casava because it's not grown there, then if the price of corn or duties on corn change or the economics of a corn-based feed mix change you can substitute tapioca into the feed and underprice (or get better margins) than your competitors.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>176: Interesting nugget here on shipping in France, an exchange between Pierre Louis-Dreyfus and Charles de Gaulle, where Pierre sarcastically said, "France can do without a shipping industry, after all, Belgium does perfectly well without an automobile industry." De Gaulle responds, "I think I get your point." Soon France began to subsidize the French shipping industry and the country built a number of ships, etc. [What's interesting here is that it's almost certain that within a decade or two France stopped building ships, and today all of the major shipyards are either in Korea or China... It makes you think what's going to happen with the shipping industry going forward when clearly we are constrained in terms of ships.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">177ff: Discussion here of some of the grain companies expanding into banking, both for the better and for the worse depending on the company.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Merchants of Grain</b></div><div dir="auto">[This chapter covers various similarities and differences across the various families; their penchant for privacy and staying invisible; control issues at some companies; other family histories.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">180: "The families are all basically paranoid. Wouldn't you be?" A former Cargill employee.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">180ff: Fallout from the Born/Bunge kidnapping: the Hirsch family left for Madrid, the Borns moved to Sao Paulo; note also in 1978 another Bunge grandson was kidnapped and murdered in Argentina.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">181: Note also the idiosyncrasy that these grain companies are still under control of the same families, unlike most modern corporations, and no industry looks like the grain industry in the sense that <i>all</i> of the leading companies are still family owned.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182ff: On the so-called interregnum at Cargill between the death of John McMillan and his brother Cargill McMillan; when John died and Cargill stepped down Whitney and Duncan, sons of both men, were too young to take over, but then later Whitney became president. "If there's any question in somebody's mind about who runs Cargill, that's somebody won't be at Cargill for long." Thus even this company remained a two-family hybrid company.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">185ff: Note here the structure of Cargill, with a family foundation in Switzerland that took a 30% interest in Cargill's Panamanian subsidiary Tradax, and then held that money in a tax shelter until distribution to family members; Also on how the family maintained a sort of standoffish demeanor in the Minneapolis establishment; they have the main headquarters hidden away in the woods outside the city. [Here also it's amusing how the author talks about how the Cargill-McMillan families who were of Scottish descent did not mingle well with the Pillsburys and other Minnesota families who were British/Yankees, Germans and Scandinavians; it all seems like distinction without a difference today, now that Minneapolis is increasingly Iraqi and Eritrean!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186: Note also with the Louis-Dreyfus family: Louis Louis-Dreyfus had been in politics and owned a newspaper in the 1930s in France, but it made his family too visible at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise; also Gerard Louis-Dreyfus showed up on Nixon's "enemies list" because he contributed money to George McGovern's campaign.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>193: Interesting discussion here of international barter for countries that don't have hard currencies to buy commodities; how it can be done by exchanging commodities with a book entry-like "clearing units" that let you buy grain in one country, then you might accept Argentine "clearing units" but at a discount and then use those units to buy the grain that it was designed for. This way you can earn the discount right back if you match the commodities and the buyers and sellers properly.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193ff: Discussion here of the exploits of former Fribourg employee Marc Najar and all of his crazy dealmaking, his wins and his losses; and then he died with his family in a private plane crash that he was piloting.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">196ff: The rise of Ned Cook, a Tennessee-based guy who went from cotton into grain, and up-and-comer competitor in the grain industry; Cook Industries did an IPO and filed financials, which annoyed the rest of the industry, Cook was a Najar-type risk taker. [It looks like this company failed in the mid-70s note also the author picks up this thread again in Chapter 13].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: Catch-22</b></div><div dir="auto">202ff: On how the dominant grain companies have tremendous informational advantages; also the ability to sell to themselves via transfer pricing across different vertical aspects of their business; the author likens it to Milo Minderbinder in the book <i>Catch-22</i> where he buys and sells eggs at what looks like a loss but actually produces a gain. Also there are certain tax benefits and currency exchange control freedoms involved here.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">208ff: Story in the mid-1970s of a group of Italian grain commodity traders in Milan who were very speculative in their behavior, who then blew up in 1975 with the collapse and grain prices after the early 70s bull market in prices. Some of the Italians refused to take delivery of contracted grain.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">213: On the question "what is the price of wheat?" There are hundreds of prices at any given time depending on hundreds of factors: grade, quality, protein content, its location, whether it's in oversupply or undersupply, water levels or an early freeze on the Mississippi, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">220ff: Discussion here of who sets grain prices, whether it's done at the different exchanges or if those prices are just reflections of large commercial contracts set by the major companies instead. Also, governments, including the US, either do not track or are not able to track grain prices; on different laws set in the 1970s requiring disclosure of grain transactions above a certain amount, but the US has no legal authority for tracking grain transactions outside the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Pyramid of Power</b></div><div dir="auto">226ff: On the 1973 Continental company flour mill established in Zaire; on and all the problems it had: two of the twelve concrete silos collapsed two months after constructionm (!) an uncle of President Mobutu was importing flour under a government license to compete with it; there was a currency collapse, and Continental decided to reduce grain shipments to the factory, leading to hoarding and lines at bakeries in Zaire; the government caved right away and Zaire's central bank paid for all subsequent shipments in dollars. <b>"It has long been recognized that oil for energy and capital to buy technology are necessary for a country's development. As the Zaire episode showed, a third resource recently has become necessary: adequate amounts of imported grain." [Interesting hear how the author frames it as a company exercising significant power over a nation state, but in reality Zaire's government cheated, didn't stick to the deal, and Continental had all the right in the world to stop delivering grain and cut them off, and they didn't even do that, they just modestly reduced shipments.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">229ff: The author frames it this way, improbably: because it was cheaper to import flour to feed rural and urban migrants (than it would have been to increase agricultural production and improve rural transportation and distribution), yet despite that a new network of bakeries appeared all over the country... and then suddenly Zaire became dependent on foreign wheat.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">229: Also an interesting blurb here about how bread became like a "constructed preference" a type of aspirational good; since it was part of the diet of the "colonial masters" it was adopted by the local elites, and then everyone else started eating it too via imitation and aspiration.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>232: Interesting here how the author argues that economic recolonization is happening with the grain industry as also with other types of food processing, as these major corporations set up things like flour mills in various developing countries. The irony is that these industries were thought of as "advanced" in 1979, but now they're not advanced at all! And most of the stuff can easily be done by third world countries with <i>their own companies,</i> in fact most of these major companies probably have sold off these assets anyway, judging by the asset-light business models of most of these companies in today's era. In any event all these products are commodities anyway.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">238ff: Discussion here of hybrid seed, most prominently with corn, but the issue here is the farmers have to buy new seeds every single year, and they can't produce their own seed or save seed from one year to the next. Yields tend to be 20-30% more with hybrid corn seeds and the following year those hybrids will not produce seeds that will duplicate the same results, in other words the hybrids don't pass on these higher yields to the next generation. This way the seed maker controls the supply and has kind of like a subscription model. Note also this is much different from wheat because wheat is self-pollinating and once a hybrid is developed it can be self-perpetuating.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">239ff: Dr. Norman Borlaug and the development of wheat hybrids; crossing Japanese dwarf wheat varieties with Mexican wheats, they didn't lodge, or fall over, during harsh weather, and this is a big part of the Green Revolution.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>242: Interesting and nuanced discussion here on multinational corporations as go-between between countries and regimes--in both positive and negative senses: in the positive sense the Russians went to grain companies directly in 1972, not to the US government. Had they gone to the US government there would have been some sort of political linkage or a demand for concessions, or either government would have made political mileage out of it, thus embarrassing the other; the companies on some level could be <i>neutral</i> go-betweens simply meeting a need. The author argues that multinational oil companies serve a similar purpose that is possibly even more politically important. Interesting conceit here. </b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>243-4: Interesting sidebar here on Rhodesia and how it avoided embargoes on maize as well as on exports of the metal chrome, as well as other exports by essentially laundering them through Mozambique and South Africa, also followed by shipments to Venezuela that Venezuela denied any knowledge of; you can kind of see how sanctions on Iranian or Venezuelan oil are destined to fail once you learn about these techniques for circumventing them.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">245: "The impression that governments are running the system is false--neither the governments nor anybody else knows what's going on." [This is an OECD official commenting on the grain industry, but he could be just as easily commenting on any other global industry! The impression of control comes from the idea that every country has its own grain (or whatever industry) authority to supervise export and import of things.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">248: Discussion here of the veritable explosion of soybean production in Brazil beginning in the late 1960s, anchor tenants here were Europe and Japan who wanted protein for animal feed. Major multinationals started to build multi-million dollar processing plants and transport infrastructure, but then some of the land used for soybeans was taken from land used for corn and black beans and as a result food prices went up in Brazil.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">250ff: Discussion of the Canadian wheat board, a significant power in world grain markets, more than you would think given Canada's size. Interesting blurb here on the bumper 1976 harvest where there was a surplus of grain that Canada managed to sell all over the world, sneaking into markets well ahead of the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: The Food Weapon</b></div><div dir="auto">255ff: Discussion here of under Secretary of State Charles Robinson in Moscow trying to extract oil from Russia at below OPEC prices in exchange for grain that Russia needed to make up for a poor harvest. This was the USA's way of working around an OPEC embargo/price increase.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">257ff: Examples from World War I and then throughout the 20th century of the US using surplus food as a sort of carrot and stick of geopolitics, supporting Marshall Tito's drive for independence from Soviet influence in the 1940s; using it as both a carrot and a stick with Chile during and after Allende's overthrow. <b>[This section also gets you thinking about self sovereignty both in the sense of a nation's soveriegnty, but also for peoples' sovereignty anywhere, especially if they live in small countries: Chile actually had bread lines and shortages of meat products in the early 1970s in the final years of Allende's regime, as an individual <i>you couldn't think of a better time</i> to have some of your own chickens or your own long-term multi-month supply of your own food.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">262: Henry Kissinger's gift for understanding the politics and realpolitik of raw materials, basic goods, oil, etc., using the lens of 18th and 19th century diplomacy. Financial details "bored him" but "he quickly mastered the politics of global resources." <b>[The reader here gets a long-winded telling of a story where Kissinger try to extract discounted oil from Russia in return for the grain sales of 1975, but this deal flopped, as the Russians refuse to sell their oil at a discount; Kissinger comes off kind of sounding like a clown here, even though the author probably didn't intend to give this impression.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: The Diplomatic Crop</b></div><div dir="auto">280ff: [This is a chapter on the global rice industry, everything from Japan, Indochina/Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Malaysia, as well as US rice farmers growing much more rice than the US market requires; also a discussion of a type of "Koreagate" controvery that happened in the 1970s.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">282: Interesting point on how decades ago individual villages would be isolated and helpless and dependent on their own rice, whereas modern infrastructure and roads and world trade makes massive famines much less likely; however even small shortfalls like a 5% decline in world rice production (which happened in 1973) drove a 300% increase in rice prices, from $200 a ton to $600 a ton.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">284: Establishment of price supports in 1941 for rice crops in the USA; also yields in the US are triple those of ordinary Asian farms. Rice farming became a very powerful small club in the US.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">284: See also Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, Chairman of the House Way and Means Committee in the 1950s and 60s: "Wilbur Mills never wrote a tax bill without getting something for rice."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">286ff: By the 1960s Japan was self-sufficient in rice and its government subsidies to rice farmers were far larger than US subsidies to its farmers. Interesting blurb here about fighting over the Okinawa rice market: the US in those days still controlled Okinawa under the terms of the Japanese surrender.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>288: Nixon tried to use loans to buy food, mainly rice with Korea, in return for their voluntary restraint on textile exports to the US. [It's quite striking how the US government used to actually <i>care</i> about domestic industries: today--uhhhh, unless you're a defense or pharmaceutical company--it feels like it's all just fend for yourself: we practically <i>encourage</i> buying everything outside the US it seems.]</b></div><div dir="auto"></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">290: See 1930s-era Korea when it exported rice to Japan but at the cost of its own starvation; "starvation exports" as Japan forced Korean to meet export requirements.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">291: Blurb here on the Japanese model of modernization after World War II, which both Korea and Taiwan emulated; it involved the movement of millions of rural people to urban areas and an increase in food imports, usually from the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>293: The author openly admits he can't even figure out who the major players are in the world rice trade, he can't even find out people's last names! Also the price of rice is difficult to know, a much more mysterious commodity then wheat or corn. Also the majors don't dominate rice; there are too many varieties and too many markets and far too many regional, specialized preferences.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">296ff: After a very long-winded introduction, finally we get to Tongsun Park, a Korean; then another sidebar on Korea's CIA, which suppressed all domestic opposition to Korea's 1960s-era regime of Park Chung Hee (abducting Koreans in West Germany who were suspected of being communist sympathizers for example); Tonsgsun Park was a sort of Korean Great Gatsby, living large in Georgetown, collecting commissions on rice sold to Korea, all during a time when Korea was more and more "needed" by the United States as the US was winding down its war in Indochina.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">300ff: Park also playing a role in "invitational diplomacy", organizing junkets for influential legislators to make trips abroad.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">301: On Congressman Otto Passman, from Louisiana, who served from 1947 to 1977. "Son, I don't smoke and I don't drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States of America." See also Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, when he was running for governor in 1970, wanted to pull off a political coup and sell Louisiana's tremendous rice surplus from that year overseas. He turned to Otto Passman and Tongsun Park, they traveled to Korea and ultimately arranged a rice deal with Nixon. Park earned big commissions from this transaction, and it appears he kicked some of that money back to the politicians themselves, he got involved in Edwards campaign (although Edwards didn't need any contributions), and worse Park gave $10,000 in cash to Edwards' wife.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">305: Park becomes increasingly well known around DC, showing up in the social news of the <i>Washington Post</i>, handing out cash to different organizations and campaigns.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>307ff: Park has his cover blown, "more or less by accident" as the author (along with fellow <i>Washington Post</i> reporter Don Oberdorfer) stumbles onto Park and his rice connection</b> while they are working on a series of articles on foreign aid food program PL-480. After these articles come out in the<i> Post,</i> Dan Morgan (again, the author) gets a call from a man who hints that he works for the CIA, asking if Morgan knew "that Park was a conduit for millions of dollars of Korean money pouring into US politics." Park gets caught when he failed to declare a watch at a US customs entry point, and in the course of a search the customs official found a piece of paper listing the names of congressman with figures next to them that were apparently amounts of money. <b>[This whole story is cool as heck, and it's a good example of reporters actually doing their job, teasing out something, trying to get at the truth, rather than what appears to be the modern journalist practice of covering up the truth.]</b> Ultimately the <i>Post</i> runs a story talking about Park's use of rice commissions to pay congressmen and the game was over; it resulted in a whole congressional inquiry in 1976. There was also a parallel Justice Department investigation that began just before the story broke.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">308: Park quick leaves the US and hides out in Seoul; California congressman Richard Hanna was indicted for 40 counts, including mail fraud and bribery, he ultimately pled to one single count and then left Congress; Otto Passman unexpectedly lost his seat in 1976, and then was indicted in 1978 for taking cash and watches from Park in return for influence; Ultimately nobody knew really what Park was trying to do. He was probably a self promoter trying to get rich and wasn't really involved in international intrigue. <b>[Again, big kudos to the author for actually uncovering this controversy: once again, this is how journalism should be done--this is the Seymour Hersh and Daniel Ellsberg model of journalism, not the gross modern version where journalism is an extension of State propaganda.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>308ff: [Park and Koreagate seem also to be an interesting example of a foreign person working a client oligarchy in the USA rather than other other way around, as Park made direct payments to American politicians for the benefit of his country's economic and foreign policy.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: The Least Forgiving Business</b></div><div dir="auto">311ff; [This is a chapter on Ned Cook, president of Cook Industries; first a little bit of history of the lower Mississippi, where all the grain elevators are; on "river rats," small-time pirates who would help themselves to grain from open barges on the river back in the day; on the measuring and loading of grain which is very inexact; how grain elevators work, inside its a labyrinth pipes, ducts, ventilators and lifts that will blend grains so that the customer gets the proper ratio of permitted broken kernels as well as other stuff, straw of course the pure grain itself; on the lack of competent grain inspection, even fraudulent inspection, see certificates in 1969 in Louisiana elevators as the quality of American barley, wheat, rice and corn received complaints.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">316ff: A tawdry sidestory here of bribes of grain inspectors caught by the FBI; witnesses talking about how samples would be pulled and then "cleaned" before the inspector graded them, also scales could be put on hold and manually adjusted, allowing you to ship excess grain to a subsidiary without it being weighed and recorded (and taxed); also radically different levels of sophistication around the world: grain is unloaded using incredibly advanced infrastructure in a Rotterdam port versus zero-tech manual unloading by men and women in Cambodia, where workers would hide rice from punctured sacks in their clothes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">319ff: Cook Industries was indicted in a conspiracy of grain lifting, grain skimming; nobody knew how much Ned Cook knew or was responsible for, but there were suspicions. Also Cook Industries was publicly traded so they had to file reports about these indictments and trials as well as of the underlying economics of their business.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">323ff: The author describes certain kickback arrangements that he was told were fairly typical in the industry, like an Iranian government buyer who bought rice from a New York dealer at a higher than market price in return for the difference going into a Swiss bank account. The mechanics worked like this: the rice merchant, after receiving payment from the Iranian government, then transferred part of that payment to his wife, who then transferred that amount to the designated Swiss bank account, which belonged to the Iranian agent.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">325ff: Ned Cook makes his foreign agents all swear that no money from Cook Industries would be used for illegal payments and bribes, but this is just the beginning of the trouble that Cook Industries began to experience.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">327ff: Back to 1972 now, during the volatility that happened in the corn and grain markets due to Russian buying; During this time Continental was actually "caught short" having committed to deliver corn to the Soviet Union when it had not actually acquired the commodity itself.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">332ff: Cook Industries and mistakes in the soybean market: Cook Industries decided, fatefully, in 1976 to hold their abundant stocks of soybeans at harvest until the following year and then go short soybeans as well <b>[I think what the author means here is they sold futures short against their supply, kind of like selling a covered call, but perhaps they sold more calls than they had in the underlying position? It's not clear and the author doesn't seem to understand these transactions well enough to describe them clearly]</b>; the strategy did not work; also the Mississippi River had a later than normal thaw and water levels were too low for certain barges to get through, so Cook became caught even <i>more</i> "short"; it also appeared that somebody was betting against Ned Cook, likely it was Bunker and Herbert Hunt from Texas, the Hunt Brothers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">334ff: Sidebar here about the Hunt Brothers and how Bunker Hunt got started with oil but then moved on to various other commodities, including silver and even sugar futures, and then moved on to soybean futures; Ned Cook and his people finally learned that they were up against the Hunts in the soybean pit; the author doesn't explain it very well yet again, but basically the Hunts had exceeded individual position limits and were possibly going to be forced to unwind their holdings; it looks like they had used agents and intermediaries to get around position limits; soybean prices went much higher and then word got out that Cook Industries was badly mispositioned.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">337ff: Cook Industries starts getting margin calls from the commodity exchange; lenders wouldn't extend the company credit and the company basically collapsed; Cook ended up being bought by Mitsui, the Japanese trading company which wanted an upstream foothold in the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">340: Brief mention here of the explosion of Continental's grain terminal in December, 1977, on the Mississippi near New Orleans, killing 36, followed by another grain elevator explosion in Galveston that Cook Industries had just sold to The Cooperative Farmers Export Company.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Blood Brother to the Earthquake</b></div><div dir="auto">342ff: This chapter gets into what drives hunger and starvation; the nature of the "food dependence" that the United States has created, ironically, by exporting so much of its food to the rest of the world; the author argues that this was not because of any American generosity, rather it was to deal with the domestic problem of our food surplus; also on the vicious circle that can happen when countries import foodstuffs and then use that foreign exchange to invest in agriculture that produces only-for-export crops like sugar, coffee or cocoa; the end result is there are still people in that country that are not fed, especially if they are poor.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">347ff: A bit of a malthusian lecture here talking about population growth going forward, the author writes "virtually all serious agricultural economists believe: the world is not running out of food and is not likely to in our lifetimes." obviously nothing any close to what anybody feared even came close to happening now that it's 45 years since this book has been published. <b>[Today the problem is battling <i>obesity</i> in many countries that just two or three generations ago were struggling with hunger!]</b> The author discusses various concerns: import dependence of countries like Poland, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina and Pakistan, on topsoil loss; on the loss of family farms, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">350ff: This chapter contains a lot of "on the one hand on the other hand" type discussions: saying that dependence on imported food need not be a bad thing, citing England throughout the 19th century depending on imports but also having tremendous influence globally, likewise see Greece and Rome during their prime eras. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">352: Interesting point the author indirectly makes here, talking about Morocco which exports phosphates to generate most of its wealth rather than allocating resources to growing more food; the problem per the author is that the phosphate reserves are finite whereas food production is annual and thus not finite in nature like natural resources are; thus one way to think about this is Morocco is exchanging a fixed resource for an unending need for food. This is an interesting way to think about it: it's sort of an inter-generational transfer of a liability (or of a dependency) if you think about it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">352: The author's "solutions" discussion here offers blindingly obvious and insight-free ideas like "countries need to make agriculture a national priority" and "third world corruption needs to be reduced" and so on.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">356: China here as a notable contra-example which has made itself self-sufficient in food.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><b>[This is one of these really good bibliographies where the author actually says which books are fun, which books are boring, which books are good, bad, etc. Well done.]</b></div><div dir="auto">***Edward Bernays: <i>Biography of an Idea</i></div><div dir="auto">Cecil Woodham-Smith: <i>The Great Hunger</i></div><div dir="auto">Nikita Khrushchev: <i>Khrushchev Remembers</i></div><div dir="auto">George Calhoun: <i>Business Life of Ancient Athens</i></div><div dir="auto">O.E. Rolvaag: <i>Giants in the Earth</i></div><div dir="auto">***Frank Norris: <i>The Pit</i></div><div dir="auto">Frank Norris: <i>The Octopus</i></div><div dir="auto">Edward Jerome Dies: <i>The Wheat Pit</i></div><div dir="auto">Gary Paulsen: <i>The Farm: A History and Celebration of the American Farmer</i></div><div dir="auto">***John Houseman: <i>Run-Through</i></div><div dir="auto">***James Trager: <i>The Great Grain Robbery</i></div><div dir="auto">Paul Kuznets: <i>Economic Growth and Structure in the Republic of Korea</i></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><i>Distant Thunder</i>, 1943 Indian film by filmmaker Satyajit Ray</div><div><br /></div></div></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-2272604139118596132024-02-20T08:36:00.000-08:002024-02-21T17:51:33.101-08:00Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse by Andrei Martyanov <div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">Author Andrei Martyanov lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and he gives readers a perceptive--and brutally candid--take on the slow-motion collapse of the USA. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Martyanov writes with the same partially-repressed astonishment of Slavoj Zizek (see for example Zizek's book <i>First As Tragedy, Then As Farce</i>). It's as if he can hardly <i>believe</i> what a clowning, clownish clownworld we live in, but he nevertheless soldiers on, teaching readers ways to understand and navigate it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The book could use a bit more editing, a few of the chapters could be tightened, and quite a few sentences could be rewritten: the author has a penchant for long, Germanic sentences with the subject dangling at the end. But these are minor criticisms of a smart and blunt book that helps readers see through the various mirages of today's America. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[The usual friendly warning: read no further. These are just my notes and copy-pastes from the text to help me remember what I've read. Life is too short!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Introduction: </b></div><div dir="auto">1ff: The author gives an example of allegations printed in the US propaganda network that Russian intelligence was paying bounties to the Taliban for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan; he counters it with a realpolitik discussion of what Russia's national interest <i>actually was</i> at that time: to keep the US bogged down in Afghanistan because that would distract the Taliban from looking northward towards the Muslim-populated Asian republics on Russia's southern flank. Russia wanted to avoid the Talibanization of the entire region.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">3: On "America's so-called elites, which have exhibited a level of malfeasance, incompetence, cowardice and betrayal of their own people on such a scale that it beggars belief. <b>Where is the precedent for such a historic occasion where a country, having no external factors pressing it into a geopolitical corner, self-obliterates with such a speed and ferocity that even the collapse of the Soviet Union begins to pale in comparison."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4: "This book is not about predictions of America's possible fates"; instead, it tries to understand the fundamental forces behind America's decline: economic, cultural, military and political. The author believes Americans elites "have become an organic part" of these forces of decline.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: On exploring the interplay of various forces: American media-intellectual elites, but also other forces like economic and military and moral forces; also the increasing balkanization of the United States, which began 25-30 years ago where we became separated by racial and ethnic loyalties [this of course is an all-too-typical problem of all multicultural societies across history.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Consumption</b></div><div dir="auto">7ff: On American grocery stores as a metaphor for the abundance here which now is beginning to be replaced by increased food insecurity by more Americans; Martyanov argues this is more characteristic of a third world country, "shatter[ing] the image of American affluence which was projected outward for decades." <b>[What he's discussing here is what I've seen elsewhere described as "the United States of Latin America" or "the United States of Asia" meaning we have bifurcated down to elites/haves and have-nots similar to the model that you would find in Latin America or many Asian countries.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12: The author notes the negatives that happened in 1990s-era Russia right after free market reforms were put in place; also claiming that significant segments of the United States population are experiencing a food situation similar to that of the Great Depression. <b>[I would add that people are getting hammered by inflation, in food and in all other spend categories, this is a huge part of the problem.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13ff: On Marx and the ideology of Marxism: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" as sort of a modern asceticism, or answering to a higher calling, as opposed to the blatant affluence and consumerism of industrial capitalism; the author ties this into a discussion of what is a good life and how is a good life defined: "Is high consumption a necessary part of a good life and of its definition?" "What would be considered sufficient or satisfactory?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">15: On the biblical phrase co-opted by Marxism in the Soviet-era slogan "who doesn't work, does not eat." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16ff: On Thorstein Veblen and the transition of consumption in the sense of "satisfying human needs" into consumption as a visible indication of wealth (and thus and lack of visible consumption is "a mark of inferiority").</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">17: A popular saying in the 1970s era USSR: "They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell!"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">18ff: Quoting lyrics from the 1980s-era influential Soviet rock band Urfiin Juice and their song "World on the Wall," which illustrates the consumerism and comparisonitis of Russians looking towards the West for all the make-believe over there; <b>[reading these lyrics actually reminds me of Los Prisoneros and their wonderful song "<a href="https://youtu.be/cPqFbBOFx_A?si=rAJL3sqKEily9Cm7" target="_blank">¿Por Qué No Se Van?</a>"]</b> The author goes on to say that the Soviet Union collapsed because the majority of the population wanted the material affluence of Western capitalism; however, this turned out to be a paradox because their culture then caught Western "affluenza."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Affluenza</b></div><div dir="auto">22: "Affluenza" defined as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23: On how instead of showing prosperity via actions that actually benefit the world, things like the Marshall Plan for example, in reality the US government (here he quotes Michael Hudson, the dissident economist) accumulated a "growing volume of claims on foreign economies, ultimately securing control over the non-Communist world's political as well as economic processes."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23ff: Discussion here of the "Kitchen Debate" between Nixon and Khrushchev where in the USA housing was affordable, most basic appliances were easily affordable... but then Nixon took the US off the gold standard; this suddenly enabled the USA to (again quoting Hudson here) "tax other nations for however the United States wanted to spend its growing budget deficit." [This is via the Treasury "base layer" money system (PS: see <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/01/layered-money-by-nik-bhatia.html" target="_blank">Nik Bhatia's excellent short book <i>Layered Money</i> for nuances here</a>) where everyone in the world essentially <i>had</i> to hold US dollars or US Treasuries. Thus the USA was able to export inflation to the rest of the non-communist world, while keeping things cheap for ourselves; we didn't really have to work or produce much: also there a useful a discussion of more of <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/j-is-for-junk-economics-by-michael.html" target="_blank">Michael Hudson's ideas of the FIRE-based economy and the de-industrialization on the United States</a>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27: The author describes his experience going to the "1969-70 Education USA" exhibition in Baku, as well as the 1976 exhibition "Technology for the American Home," also in Baku: people couldn't conceal their marveling at America's classrooms, their furniture, their homes, "American homes looked futuristic, affluent, and they stirred desires in others... There was no denying that the Americans, as it seemed then, live better, much better, and the average Soviet citizen, and both sides knew it."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">28ff: Contrasting this idealized vision from them with various current statistics of the USA's debt-financed economy: worsening economic indicators (and also "bending" economic indicators to fit "the affluence narrative") to the point where "one has to question the US claim to be a first world country... people do notice signs of a dramatic deterioration of life all around them and at some point a consensus begins to emerge."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">33: "Even openly biased, if not altogether lying, media such as Seattle's very own KOMO News couldn't ignore the fact of the once beautiful, safe and clean Seattle turning into a mecca for the homeless, drug addicts and criminals." Citing KOMO News' documentary "Seattle Is Dying"; on how the lack of normality was becoming a norm in many places in the United States, not just in Seattle. See also Seattle's infamous CHOP Zone (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest): the author says "the whole area looked like a war zone. It also looked dirt poor."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Geoeconomics</b></div><div dir="auto">40: On British Russophobia in the second half of the 19th century, leading to competition with Russia and then open conflict in the Crimean War; this initiated a series of events that contributed to the Russian Revolution and influenced the outcome of World War II, this is basically British imperialism.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">41ff: On Karl Haushofer, the German statesman thought of as the brains behind the third Reich; his love-hate relation with Britain and Britain's colonial possessions; the Soviets saw German National Socialism as the highest form of imperialism, or as Marx's Theory phrased it, the highest form of capitalism: economic expansion and the acquisition of new markets often accompanied with extreme violence; "conquest motivated by economic interests."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">42ff: The author moves on to America's version of its own geoeconomics, citing a few different works including a book called <i>War By Other Means</i> by Jennifer M. Harris and Robert D. Blackwill, as well as a couple other works, all delusionally citing American economic, political and military power, when in reality we actually are in an economic and political crisis and not competitive, we have little manufacturing, etc., and are "a hologram or an illusion of a nation state... which has lost its ability to compete economically with the rest of the world."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46ff: The American economy "looks good on paper... when in reality it is turning into a third world economy in front of our own eyes." Various statistics follow here of the complete hollowing out of our industrial sector and its implications, not just for the well-being of the country but also for national defense. <b>You cannot have proper military defense if you don't have tremendous manufacturing capacity--along with extra surge capacity on top of manufacturing base.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49ff: Ford as well as other automakers and how their car quality and pricing are not competitive with automakers from other countries. "The time when the world would look at American made products with curiosity and envy has long since passed."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">51ff: Commercial shipbuilding, which has shrunk down to almost nothing in the United States, now dwarfed by China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. Our shipbuilding capacity is less than 1% of global capacity, <b>[I knew it was small but had no idea it was that small!]</b> Obviously this is not reasonable for a country that sees itself as economically dominant globally; likewise our steel production is fairly small as well, outproduced by China by a factor of 11, Russia with half or less of the US population produces 81% of US steel output, Japan produces more steel than the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54ff: The author notes the "pathetic state" of America's commercial shipbuilding, its loss of leadership in industrial businesses, also experiencing intellectual collapse; how the USA has less and less to offer economically other than Treasury bills; the author argues that "it is not a far-fetched scenario" to see the United States turning into "a large but regional and even third world nation."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Energy</b></div><div dir="auto">59: "Energy is not only the single most consequential economic factor; it is also a massive geopolitical one."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>59: Side note here about Baku, where oil has been drilled since 1846 [!] long before the Pennsylvania American oil fields; Azerbaijan was producing more than half the world's oil in the early 20th century.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60ff: Measures of economic dominance based on MTOE (millions of tons oil equivalent): China leads the world with 2,684 MTOE versus the US at 2,303 MTOE, and Russia at 1506; likewise measuring economic development by electricity production from all sources: China dominates with 7,482 terawatts per hour production; the US is a distant second at 4,385, India at 1,614, Russia at 1,122. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">61ff: Explanation of what really happened in the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna in 2020 where Russia did not agree to production cuts: the result was the US fracking industry collapsed because it was exposed to "real economics" under a lower oil price. In reality US shale/fracking oil was financially non-viable.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">64: Stinging quote here: "As it is always the case with the US mainstream media, they got it all wrong" with regard to what was happening with this Vienna OPEC+ meeting, saying it was to punish the US for the Nordstrom 2 pipeline destruction. The US media started speculating here, falsely, reporting about Russia's gold and currency reserves allegedly running low, even predicting Vladimir Putin would lose power, etc. <b>[Note: I'm not sure I agree with this author's timeline here, the US shale oil industry cratered in 2015-2016, I'm not sure there was much left of it in 2020 that wasn't already in or nearing bankruptcy.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">66ff: Discussion of various incorrect pundits making stupid and ignorant comments about Russia, mostly made up, and not having any context about what's actually going on in Russia, what Russia's motivations are, etc. <b>"The fact that such experts are still given a public tribune in the United States and are treated as 'experts' is a powerful testimony to the decline of professional expertise in the United States, not just in fields inherently susceptible to fraud such as political science and political commentary but in fields which actually do require a good grasp of all the reality 'on the ground' skills to have at least some understanding of the subject matter."</b> [Ouch, but then again, it is like shooting fish in a barrel to mock our solipsistic, overconfident pundit class.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">67: The result here was that Russia became "impervious" to US pressures "and was the only truly energy independent nation on earth."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">68: Saudi Arabia turned out to be Russia's proxy in this whole geoeconomic dispute, not the United States' proxy. Also Russia quickly grew its gold and FX reserves to $600 billion; furthermore, China refilled all of her oil storage with cheap oil and founded a massive strategic partnership deal with Iran which has gigantic geopolitical ramifications for the US. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">69: The US is even wrong in assuming that Russia is fiscally dependent on hydrocarbons, it's only 29% of the country's budget revenues.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">72ff: Discussion of the green movement; <b>on Germany committing "energy suicide" by laying down its industrial economy; Germany's economic output is extremely energy sensitive, it is the highest energy cost of developed industrial economies; this approach is "madness";</b> "Things will get much worse in Europe and they may never get better."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76: On the US sabotaging European independence and their ability to obtain affordable energy, the author claims this is possibly in order for the US to sell Europe LNG as well as sink the competitiveness of European goods and boost American made products: to "kill two rabbits with one shot." <b>[If this is true then maybe we aren't as hypocognizant as he thinks we are [!] setting aside the fact that this would be an incredibly evil plan to foist on our European "allies." It all reminds me of Kissinger's cynical quote: "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal"].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Making Things</b></div><div dir="auto">82: "Michael Hudson is not the only prominent Western economic thinker who is consistently on record warning about the travails and in the end, the inevitable grievous conclusion of finance capitalism." Note also this interesting comment here about Senator Marco Rubio who, while not in denial of Hudson's views but unfortunately is also "an unabashed believer in American exceptionalism--precisely the very disease driving America's precipitous decline."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">83ff: <b>Bill Clinton and his presidency, the "outsourcer-in-chief" [ouch!];</b> opening the US economy to NAFTA and China which completed the de-industrialization of the US; following "abstract economic theories" that led to America committing economic suicide; "China accepted what was offered; what was offered made China the de facto primary consumer goods manufacturing hub of the world." <b>The author quotes the old Marxist joke that "the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">87ff: Standard discussion here of STEM graduates, on China having far more than the US; also note Russia actually has almost the exact number of STEM graduates as the US but with half the population--not to mention they're almost all Russian citizens unlike US STEM graduates who are more than a third non-US citizens; Martyanov also notes that STEM isn't a key goal of the American education system anyway, it's more interested in self-expression, political correctness and indoctrination; also on the lack of perceived "glamour" of engineering "making things" kinds of jobs.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">91: I don't think the author realizes that Tyler Durden is a character from the book <i>Fight Club,</i> which is used as a pseudonymous byline for all Zerohedge articles; he is not an actual reporter at Zerohedge.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>91: [Interesting discussion here of intangible assets and how to value a corporation when it does something intangible (in the accounting sense) like writing software or performing services; in a company, the value of the office and the furniture isn't what matters; obviously also services, software, internet companies, etc., are all significantly different industries compared to say an industrial company, where the factory and inventory are tangible assets that can be seen, have a dollar value, etc. This is an interesting problem, and the author reaches a very wrong conclusion saying that the valuation (of intangible assets and companies) is "generally a fraud"--I think accounting always has to be adjusted for a messy reality, this is the job of the securities analyst and the accounting profession to try to "account" for things. And it gets much more difficult the less "physical and tangible" a company is!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">92ff: Various comments and statistics here indicating that China has long passed the US in economic might and likely in GDP; it's only the US essentially making up numbers that blurs the distinction of who's first, as the US (per the author) will value two people shining each other's boots for $10 as $20 of GDP when China makes two and a half times the vehicles the US makes, China makes most of our tech products, toys, key imports etc. The author is quite bombastic in his writing here, claiming the US economy is in "a death spiral" for example. <b>[I'd also push back here and ask: why can't service businesses or software businesses have legitimate value too? Quite honestly they are in many ways "better businesses" than "thing-based" businesses like manufacturing and agriculture; they also tend to be less asset intensive, they tend to have far better cash flow characteristics, etc. Which, then, are higher value? These are all reasonable questions to ask as the US evolves more and more towards a services economy.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">95ff: Boeing as the embodiment of America's industrial "suicide"; its key competitive advantage is lobbying: see how Boeing spent much more on lobbying than Airbus in order to win the Air Force tanker contract with its KC-46 Pegasus, while this jet platform is having a huge number of technical problems. See also problems with the B-737 Max: plane crashes, "long-time circulating rumors of Boeing's growing incompetence and dubious design and manufacturing practices." Note the B-737 problems were due to flight control software, which was incidentally outsourced to India. This was followed by problems with the B-787 Dreamliner, </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">100ff: The author comments here on American intellectuals claiming that a country like Russia would be incapable of developing her hydrocarbon extraction without access to Western technology; the author condescendingly refers to these "intellectuals" as graduates with degrees in journalism and political science or sociology who have <i>no idea</i> that a country that built space stations and complex industrial technology would see hydrocarbon extraction as a routine process for them; further Russia has successfully counter sanctioned the West with their own extraction and processing technologies, combining with OPEC+, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">101ff: Discussion here of Russia's MC-21 single-aisle medium range commercial jet, which is "the most sanctioned aircraft in history" with performance "either superior or vastly superior" to comparable airplanes by Boeing. Also Russia has "a complete enclosed technological cycle" for aircraft, design, R&D, manufacturing, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>102: An insight here regarding the US deciding to sanction the export of carbon fiber composites to Russia: this had to do with the MC-21 aircraft which had composite wings; the insight here is that every time we sanction Russia <i>they just develop their own industry and do it themselves</i>, they had the ability and the technology, but what they lacked was the scale that gigantic US companies typically bring. But if we lock them out of a marketplace then they have no choice but to design their own products or use their own technology which they're quite capable of doing. [This is another example of how we are harming ourselves because our elites don't see the second-order consequences of their sanctions decisions.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">103: Geoeconomics, or war by other means, is where "the ability to produce needed tangible things" (something the US is losing the ability to do) becomes "crucial for the survival" of a nation. On watching America's steady decline in manufacturing and seeing the USA make no efforts to reindustrialize, even though we are seeing "explosive industrial development in Eurasia, especially in China and Russia."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104-5: Interesting quotes here: one from Herbert Spencer from his book <i>War: Studies From Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology,</i> where he wrongly states that the breaking down of divisions between nations would lead to benefits to the United States; and then from Corelli Barnett from <i>The Collapse of British Power</i>, citing Adam Smith's doctrine of free trade which had a "baneful effect" on Britain, Smith attacked the mercantilist belief that a nation should be self-supporting. <b>[The idea here is that Americans have forgotten how to be self-supporting, and through their stupid sanctioning they're causing other countries like Russia to become totally self-supporting when they used to be much more dependent on US tech and knowhow.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Western Elites</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>110ff: "Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."</b> Harsh quote from John Neely Kennedy, senator from Louisiana, speaking on the Senate floor in March 2020; on various recognitions of incompetence in the United States, something that began long before the COVID pandemic response, and long before the 2008 financial crisis; <b>On "grandiosity" </b>as an ailment both of the United States as well as of presidents like Bill Clinton; grandiosity is also what the majority of American elites suffer from, "a grandiose misjudgment of their own capabilities."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>113: "Today's United States, moreover, is increasingly exposed as being ruled by an oligarchy, or rather by two ruling clans, and de facto is neither a democracy nor a republic."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">114ff: On how easy it is to mock American geopolitical thought and geopolitical intellectual leaders; mocking Thomas Friedman's "absurd and now repeatedly falsified" Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention: that two countries with McDonald's franchises had never been to war; see also embarrassingly wrong works like Francis Fukiyama's <i>The End of History</i> or Samuel P. Huntington's <i>The Clash of Civilizations</i> ("despite some interesting insights in the latter" the author faintly praises); "Within ten or so years of those works being published, in 1992 and 1996 respectively, both were proven false in their main points in the most dramatic fashion," to the point where later their ideas appeared "altogether silly." Also Zbigniew Brzezinski's magnum opus <i>The Grand Chessboard</i> was "a collection of cliches."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">116: "Historical causality was never a strong point of American geopolitical thought," the US was better at producing self-serving narratives with little understanding of formative geopolitical factors or any real knowledge of their subjects, be they Russia, China etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">116ff: On "the myth of Henry Kissinger's acumen," who "typified American PR going into overdrive to promote analysts who forwarded an approved agenda but were singularly lacking as outstanding minds." Note also Kissinger's "credibility" argument used to justify the Vietnam War, and the fact that an entire generation of hawks have used the same claim to justify new wars. <b>[See also the note for page 170, below.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>118ff The American intellectual apparatus as made up of "one trick ponies, since they operate on the assumption of America's omnipotence."</b> See this in stark contrast to the dictum of Bismarck that a political act "is the art of the possible, the attainable--the art of the next best." American strategists are not conditioned to think of consequences of their decisions.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">120-1: comment here on the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, which lasted just five days, showing the lack of effectiveness of a NATO-trained and equipped Georgian army. <b>[Speaking of my own ignorance I never even heard of this conflict; it certainly gives (very) early indications of the flaws and fragilities of US arms and military might that are increasingly apparent now.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>121: On American exceptionalist-type thinkers "having a level of ideological fervor and detachment from reality that could make the most dedicated Maoists blush."</b> How the US had no idea what they were doing fomenting a civil war and a coup in Ukraine, which instantly instigated Crimea's secession, for example.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>122: [Excellent example of a Germanic sentence here, with a subject at the very end of a paragraph-long sentence.</b> "For people who put their faith in the ideas espoused by the court minds of Brzezinski, Fukuyama, Huntington or even the relatively independent Mearsheimer, to say nothing of an army of American and Western military porn purveyors ranging from cadre officers to even comic artists, facing a world in which America is regarded as a big mouth bully that nobody is afraid of, and which economically is primarily smoke and mirrors, is a life-changing experience."]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">123: This guy spares no one! On the Council of Foreign Relations: "a rather grossly overrated collection of America's statesman and stateswomen." Also the "obvious intellectual and cultural decline" of the CIA.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">125ff: On the incompetence of American Russian studies field practitioners: Brzezinski (Carter's National security advisor and Obama's foreign policy advisor) as "Russophobic" and a "white board theoretician." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">130: Interesting blurb here on what the author calls <b>"epistemic closure":</b> he talks about a self-sealing American belief system which "is incapable of accepting empirical evidence because it destroys American exceptionalism's extreme confirmation bias," and intellectuals on both the left and the right cannot deal with it because it's too painful and difficult, thus they simply are not professionally equipped to deal with a fast-moving world with the gigantic changes that are happening. <b>[This idea of epistemic closure is interesting and worth thinking about, it sounds a little bit like the ludic fallacy or at least tangential to it. Maybe another way to think about it would be geopolitical solipsism: you think everyone in the world thinks the way you do, so you literally cannot anticipate anyone taking any action that you didn't already think of; you're hopelessly adrift (and can't evenunderstand it) if someone does something you didn't expect.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>135-6: The American intellectual class as "unteachable": unable to understand the limits of their own expertise, unaware of the limited weight of their own opinions.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">142ff: Discussion here of the moral degeneration and perversity of United States elites and intellectuals; discussion of Epstein, of pedophilia, etc., all of this as metaphor for the Western elites' moral and intellectual decay. The West's "self-proclaimed intellectual classes" rejected truth and "betrayed the majority of people they were supposed to serve."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>146: "This is no longer an issue of just Marxism, Liberalism, Conservatism or any other isms Western intellectuals so love to produce--it is an issue of the physical survival of the west, which is in a state of clinical extremity."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: Losing the Arms Race</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>151ff: "...the main American export today is inflation" and maintenance of the myth of American military omnipotence "sustains the dollar printing press."</b> On the idea that economists are either oblivious of this dynamic, or take it as a given, or their view on US military power is shaped by entertainment.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">153ff: The so-called tanker war in the Persian Gulf from 1984-1988, a sideshow of the Iran-Iraq War; the US went into the region with their Navy both to defend shipping as well as to repair Arab policy; contrast the gravitas of the USA then with today's era, where the US cannot win wars at all, has weird obsessions like wishing to subdue Iran for some reason; all the US methods of subterfuge like assassination, sanctions, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">158ff: The US "has lost the arms race." Examples like the Tomahawk missile, 70% shot down by the Syrians, a tremendously embarrassing story that American citizens are oblivious to; the decline and bankruptcy of the entire American approach to warfare: seeking "swift" victory and staying within the whims of a four year election cycle, an extreme sensitivity to taking casualties, capable of handling only weaker, smaller enemies.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">162ff On basing naval power on aircraft carriers that "provide excellent visuals" but won't survive in the modern battlefield; aircraft carriers are merely <b>"prestigious targets"</b> to modern hypersonic missile strikes. <b>"...the arrival of hypersonic missiles has changed warfare forever and made the 100,000 ton displacement mastodons of the US Navy obsolete and very expensive sacrificial lambs in any real war."</b> Note that these missiles exceed sometimes significantly the range of carrier aircraft, including airborne early-warning aircraft. This iteration of missile technology disintermediates the primary (and primarily "visual") tools of American power projection. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">165ff: The author cites Iran's retaliatory attacks on US and NATO bases in the region after the US assassinated General Soleimani, using serious weapons over intermediate range, not a single missile was intercepted by US anti-missile technology. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">166: See Syria, defended far more effectively with Russian-made air defense systems.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>170: The Ledeen Doctrine: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."</b> The author says even this doctrine doesn't work anymore: the United States lost all of its Wars of the 21st century, all those small, "crappy little countries" fought back. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>171: "Constant declarations about its own military greatness reveals a long and deeply hidden US inferiority complex when it comes to warfare."</b> The United States is "a culture in which war has become a business... and profiteering and greed remove any considerations of actual national interest and realistic defense requirements."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">176ff: On the real risk of the US dramatically underestimating Russian capability, and then stumbling into a kinetic war with Russia, losing terribly, and then escalating to nukes to respond the the political and military humiliation. On the ideological paranoia of today's media regarding Russia: back during the Soviet era we overestimated Russian capabilities, now we grievously underestimate them. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">178ff Various intriguing and unsettling thoughts here: the US is suddenly talking about hypersonic missiles but has nothing to deploy, it has no shipyard capacity to add this capability to ships; Russia is already well stocked in this field with a military that gets tremendous bang for the buck; the US military-industrial complex churns out "ridiculously expensive and ineffective weapons that are obsolete before they leave the manufacturing floor."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">183ff Disturbing accounts of academic incompetence of students at US military academies , citing public letters from professors. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">185: On how the US military exists for the enrichment of globalists rather than for the actual defense of the country.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Empire Uber Alles--Including Americans</b></div><div dir="auto">191ff: On American leadership not having any strategy--certainly not a grand strategy--and even being situationally unaware; how the United States gets involved in wars that are conducted contrary to real American national interests, instead these wars support transnational corporations and global financial institutions and their agendas.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195ff: On countries like France, the USA, etc., that are no longer actually nations: on "France descending into the chaos of globalist multicultural orthodoxy" and the US subverted by ethno-religious and corporate interests; on the doctrine of starting profitable wars; see also Steve Sailor's "invade the world invite the world" paradigm where you see no conflict in destroying nations abroad by invading them but then admitting that countries refugees fleeing all the destruction you've wreaked--and then simultaneously destroying your cultural fabric at home with immigration levels that your cultural fabric cannot handle.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">199ff: On the paradox of the United States never being one people in the past, even at its founding, but it almost certainly will never be one people in the future, given the racially and politically charged violence rolling over the US in the 2020s. Even the white majority is bifurcating on ideological lines: split between supporters of globalist elites and widely disparaged white "deplorables"; "one is forced to question whether the United States is even capable of formulating any national interest when it already is composed of several nations..." [here he means white, black, latino, Jewish, etc.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">200: On the so-called "Israel lobby" in the United States, which somehow has convinced Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical while we act "primarily albeit not exclusively" in Israel's interest in the Middle East.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">200: On the idea that no one is working for the average American citizen, who's being robbed and run into the ground by policies which do not serve the shrinking America middle and working class; middle class and working class Americans slaughtered "on the altar of globalism and multiculturalism whose only beneficiaries are transnational corporations."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: To Be or Not To Be</b></div><div dir="auto">203: On "the multicultural disaster the United States has become" such that "[t]here is no distinct American identity because whatever that might have been hasn't been allowed to settle."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">203ff: On Russia's move to solve this problem by deeming Russian as the language of the state founding people; Russians recognize that living peacefully in a multicultural country is possible only by recognizing the significance of the majority of its people. This is obviously something that would be regarded as racist and unmentionable today in the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">207: Various "grotesque" forms of balkanizing and racializing the United States: as an object example the author cites a report from the Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, declaring math "racist" and saying "who gets to say if an answer is right?" </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">207ff: On the various disintegrative forces of modernism manifested in exhibitionism, self-absorption, attention-span-shrinking social networks, etc. "Modern reality is increasingly ugly, because it lacks truth in multiple sectors, not just political and economic, but cultural and artistic."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">209ff: The author gives himself away as a Boomer here with his comment here on Deep Purple and their significance in Western pop art and their "legendary lineup throughout the 1970s" ... and then moves on to articulate his disgust with modern art. :)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">212ff: On Americans blacklisting each other, but in a form unlike the 1950s-era blacklists which were at least to accuse people of associating with national enemies. "Now it's about reshaping the United States into a one-party dictatorship."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>212-3: "Both American political parties are neoliberal globalist entities tightly connected to different wings of the American oligarchy." [This is a good one-sentence summary of the current American political landscape]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>217: On Dimitri Orloff's concept of a "meat generation" in his book of the same name</b>, essentially referring to millennials sacrificed on the altar of the globalist dream, basically like cows butchered because there's nothing left to milk. [What a disturbing and horrifying image.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">217ff: On Jim Jeffery, the envoy for the US ambassador to Syria, who nonchalantly admitted that he lied to the President about US forces in Syria: the author say this marks <b>"a peculiar turn in America's culture, where the institutions of state act entirely out of their own interest, fraudulently informing the commander-in-chief." [Robert Malone would agree <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/lies-my-government-told-me-by-dr-robert.html" target="_blank">in his discussions of the administrative state in his book <i>Lies My Government Told Me</i></a>, and likewise <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/07/democracy-incorporated-managed.html" target="_blank">Sheldon Wolin in </a><i><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/07/democracy-incorporated-managed.html" target="_blank">Democracy, Inc</a>.</i>]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">219: "The overwhelming majority of America's modern political class has no grasp of the extent of social forces it is playing with and the possible outcomes... These are not people who understand the implications of a breakdown of civil society and law and order, which very many of them advocate." <b>See for example Olympia, WA's mayor supporting BLM until someone from BLM <i>vandalized her house</i>, upon which she called it "unfair" and "domestic terrorism."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Conclusion: Not Exceptional, Not Free, Not Prosperous--Not America?</b></div><div dir="auto">225: On the various ironies of Megyn Kelly taking her son out of private school and moving out of Manhattan in reaction to what she thought was woke indoctrination; on the "baneful effect on America's social cohesion" that woke orthodoxy has, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">228: On Russian journalist Irina Alksnis who pointed out that only Russians can understand the American experience of losing its exceptionalist status: "the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic catastrophe which followed taught Russians a lot, and also left an aftertaste of the humiliation of losing power--a process the United States is going through right now... the Russians get it. They, unlike any other people in the world, can relate to what the United States is going through right now. Russians can read the signs extremely well, while the US elite not only has no experience with it but is completely insulated from understanding it. This is America's tragedy unfolding before our very eyes. <b>Not only is America's crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured, badly educated and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as reality."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>232ff: The author goes full black pill here with a prediction that, quite honestly, is starting to look more and more plausible with each passing year.</b> "The political tyranny will start with demolishing the US Constitution and transitioning the country to a de jure one-party state with political purges following this transition. Initially these purges will be in the form of firing people from their jobs or preventing them from getting employment, but eventually the social score system will be introduced officially and the 'rehabilitation camps' may become a reality. One may say that this is too dystopian and fantastic to even consider. If it is, it is all for the better. But for a country where half of the population believed that the president of the United States was Russia's Manchurian candidate, with all the media singing in a single voice promoting this fantasy, or where most universities define human nature as a social construct, or where people who have zero background in such fields as physics, mathematics or chemistry are driving the 'green energy' field--in such a country nothing is impossible." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">233ff: The author writes about his striking contrast to flying between Russia and the United States in the early to mid 1990s, going from Mafia-controlled Russia to the United States. He describes stepping off the plane in the USA and entering an airport bar where the show "Cheers" was playing on the bar's TV, and he describes the surreal experience of the show compared to his often terrifying Russian life experiences during those days. He then goes on to describe American writer Rod Dreher's visceral response to seeing the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, a Russian Orthodox Church completed in May 2020. Dreher asks, "Could we build anything like this in america? Don't be absurd." Martyanov goes on to comment about how the "cathedrals" being built in this era in America are postmodern, boxy megachurches, "preaching the prosperity gospel." Finally, a minor note of partial optimism as he says that even though Russia went through what it went through, they maintained a nation and a culture, despite the fact that it took them 20 years to emerge from the 1990s experiment with neoliberalism. The question remains whether the United States actually has a nation anymore, or has a people that will regain its spirit.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Karl Marx: <i>Critique of the Gotha Program</i></div><div dir="auto">John J. Mearsheimer: <i>Liberal Dreams and International Realities</i></div><div dir="auto">John De Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor: <i>Affluenza</i></div><div dir="auto">Andrei Martyanov: <i>Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning</i></div><div dir="auto">Michael Hudson: <i>Super Imperialism: The Origin And Fundamentals of US World Dominance</i></div><div dir="auto">Herbert Spencer: <i>War: Studies From Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology</i></div><div dir="auto">***Corelli Barnett: <i>The Collapse of British Power</i></div><div dir="auto">Samuel Huntington: <i>The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking Of World Order</i></div><div dir="auto">Peter Huchthausen: <i>America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of US Military Engagements:1975-2000</i></div><div dir="auto">Tim Bakken: <i>The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, And Failure in the US Military</i></div><div dir="auto">Christopher Caldwell: <i>Reflections on the Revolution in Europe</i> </div><div dir="auto">Bronislaw Malinowsky: <i>An Anthropological Analysis of War: War Studies from Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology</i></div><div dir="auto">***Dmitry Orlov: <i>The Meat Generation</i></div><div dir="auto">Finally, note this<a href="https://dgibbs.arizona.edu/content/brzezinski-interview-2" target="_blank"> striking excerpt from an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski on Afghanistan</a>: It appears the Russians learned from their mistakes in Afghanistan, while American "strategists" keep repeating theirs.</div><div><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-73040563471853811882024-02-15T18:06:00.000-08:002024-02-16T13:25:46.837-08:00A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Across 367 interminable pages of bitching about Boomers, author Bruce Cannon Gibney does one thing well: <i>he manages to sound exactly like a Boomer.</i> Snarky, overconfident, often wrong yet never in doubt, and simply relentless. You can practically hear the author loud-talking over you as you read. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Gibney also seems to lack a sequential memory for his own arguments. It's quite striking to see an author lambast Boomers for never saving any money (Chapter 4), but then just two chapters later make an extended argument about the Boomers' skill at acquiring inflation-sensitive assets, even describing them as the savviest generation "since Weimar." Another example: after claiming Boomers are unwilling to tax themselves to furnish funds for education, the author notes in a footnote just two pages later that the United States spends more tax dollars per student than any other advanced country. And my favorite example, dealing with Vietnam: the author directly claims Boomers were a militant generation that was hungry for war during the mid 1960s, yet later he blames them for being a generation of draft-dodgers.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">There are many self-contradicting claims like these throughout <i>A Generation of Sociopaths,</i> to the point where it's concerning to see the author's lack of awareness <i>of his own book.</i> Readers are left scratching their heads: "Hold on: you just said <i>this</i> to make <i>that</i> point, but now you're saying the opposite to make <i>this</i> point... don't these things cancel each other out? <i>And don't you even remember what you just wrote a few pages ago?"</i> One gets the feeling of being lectured by a smug and legalistic dude who will say <i>anything</i>--including self-contradictory things--to make his case. To a man with a hammer everything is a Boomer.</div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Ultimately, after hundreds of pages of reaching, hard, to dunk on Boomers, this author achieves the impossible: The reader, incredibly, develops sympathy for them! It reminds me of <a href="https://youtu.be/YKT7bx-fmtk?si=RvhHSOUrK90mKy6W" target="_blank">this video mocking geeks sleeping out in costume for a Star Wars movie premiere</a>: it's supposed to be funny, but the mocker just looks like an angry bully, and you start rooting for his victims.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Look, Boomers as a generation, whether they like to hear it or not, <i>have</i> largely drained and indebted the country and <i>have</i> made things much harder for the generations to follow. But when you hear an Xer or a Millennial complain about Boomers being <i>the worst, most self-absorbed generation in history, ever!!!1!</i> recognize that this complaint is ironically Boomer-like. After all, claiming that living behind the Boomers is really <i>that</i> bad is about as self-centered and self-absorbed as the generation you're complaining about. It's the same sin.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It's also worth noting, now that thirteen years have passed since this author wrote the initial essay that led to this book, that there aren't nearly as many Boomers around anymore. Now, more and more, the leaders of this increasingly incompetent country are <i>us</i>, Generation X and Millennials--and soon enough, Gen Z. It's not for us who follow to bitch and moan. We are now increasingly in charge of things. It's for us to shut up and pick up the pieces.</div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Readers, you know what's coming: a friendly warning to read no further. What follows are just my notes and critiques--and I've already wasted enough of my time writing them. I'd hate to waste still more of your time reading them. Remember <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law" target="_blank">Brandolini's Law</a>!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><b>Notes: </b><div dir="auto"><b>Forward:</b></div><div dir="auto">xi: Our author starts with a haymaker right in the first paragraph. <b>"For the past several decades, the nation has been run by people who present, personally and politically, the full sociopathic pathology: deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility, the works. These people are the Baby Boomers, that vast and strange generation born between 1940 and 1964, and the society they created does not work very well."</b></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xii: The author anticipates a common Boomer reaction, NOT ALL OF US ARE LIKE THAT. [Maybe we can use the acronym NABALT here.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xii: Gibney is perplexed, asking, "why isn't 21st century America doing vastly better?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xivff: Already it's clear the author has a coastal elite's incomprehension of Trump's appeal to flyover country.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xix: The author cites a tagline from an essay he wrote in 2011: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Introduction:</b></div><div dir="auto">xxiiff: Standard discussion here of how the typical middle class family can't afford the elements of the middle class life: a house, cars, college, vacation, healthcare, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xxv: Still more standard complaints about the 1% getting all the wealth and welfare gains; noting also that Boomers will still be cushioned with their trillions of entitlement dollars; most of the country still seems wealthy and prosperous but it is largely illusory since it's been levitated with debt, both personal and government. <b>The author claims government debt is "a primary Boomer tactic to ensure their benefits flow while expenses pass to others... And at some roughly coterminous point, the Boomers will be dead and the problem will belong to someone else. That someone else, of course, is statistically likely to be: <i>you</i>."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xxviff: The Boomers' sociopathic need for instant gratification, which pushed them to equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future. [The author also makes very clear that when he refers to Boomers he means white and always native born, just in case this wasn't clear...] Discussion of the definition of sociopathy, quoting the DSM etc, Boomers are mixed bag of good and bad as individuals but as a generation they are distinctly sociopathic per the author, and their "villainy expresses itself to the mundane depredations of tax policy and technical revisions to the bankruptcy code." [An interesting pair of examples here the author chooses to use, one can't help wondering why he chose them, and why put it this way so early on in the book.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>xxviii: Boomers' "private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism, the sociopathic operating system that has dominated Boomer politics, Right and Left, for more than three decades."</b> Emphasizing consumption, deregulation without thought, permanent deficits. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xxxi: "It depends what the meaning of the word 'is' is": the author uses the famous example of Clintonian lying as a typical example of Boomer sociopathic deceit, as Clinton "could not even manage an honest conjugation of "to be."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xxxii: The author admits up front that "much of the evidence is necessarily circumstantial." [If I were a betting man at this point in the book, I'd bet that nearly all of his evidence will be circumstantial... It's easy to imagine a perfect world and impugn the world you have by comparison.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter One: The View From 1946</b></div><div dir="auto">3: Good example of this author's rose-tinted backwards-looking glasses: "in the three decades following World War II, it would have been ridiculous to pose the question, as Ronald Reagan would when seeking the Presidency in 1980, 'Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?' The answer was yes, always and emphatically." [This actually isn't entirely true if you count the 1970s-era inflation, unemployment and natural resource shortages, etc. Also history always has periods where people are not better off than they were four years ago: think about panics of the 1890s, the 1907 crisis, the severe depression of 1919-1920, and obviously the Great Depression, while it is true we had a a series of very good decades after World War II.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4: "Boomers have always thought of themselves as special, and nothing about their childhoods provided any evidence to the contrary." The author then contrasts the Boomers' life of ease with the suffering of the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and the UK after World War II. <b>[Thus the boomers are to blame for everything including things that happened before they were born apparently]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9: "Shambolic" appears to be the author's favorite word: he uses it almost as much as "the."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11: The author doesn't understand how post World War II debt was "paid down"... it <i>wasn't</i> paid down, it was inflated away. Further I don't think he understands what happened when Reagan cut tax rates in the 80s based on his conclusion that high marginal tax rates produced extraordinary tax receipts, this guy sounds much more economically blind than he really should be as a private equity guy. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Bringing Up Boomer</b></div><div dir="auto">13ff: 1957's <i>Leave It to Beaver</i>, which the author considers to be an anthropologically rigorous portrait of Boomer childhood.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">14ff: Discussion of John Locke's theories of childhood; then Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, author of <i>The Care and Feeding of Children</i>, the 1894 bestseller citing how children were not to be indulged; then to the rise of Dr. Benjamin Spock and the "permissive parent."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16ff: Now we've moved on to scatological topics: the author addresses defecatory schedules and how Dr. Spock indulged letting a child poop when it wanted to (otherwise it would become neurotic and anal retentive) whereas Freud warned, as the author puts it, "that indulgent toilet training would lead to an anal-expulsive personality, one that proceeded from literal to figurative incontinence, personalities of messiness, disorder, and rebelliousness (e.g., the Boomers)." Weird and odd to say this. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">17ff: The author's various reasons for Boomers pathologies: everything from Dr Spock's permissiveness, to bottle feeding rather than breastfeeding, lead paint, to the television; here there's a long and quite frankly uninsightful discussion of the cancerous aspects of televised programming, nothing new to any reader.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22ff: It's interesting to think about this author's complaints about Boomer generation television: yet who on television today is actually still a Boomer? Jim Cramer? Sure, but everybody knows that you make money off Jim Cramer <i>by doing the opposite of whatever he says</i>. No one takes him seriously. Boomers like Katie Couric haven't been on TV in years. Rachel Maddow was an Xer, and her replacement Alex Wagner is a <i>young</i> Xer, born in 1977. Show me a Boomer on TV and I'll be happy to blame them, but this guy doesn't seem to know who's on TV any more.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23: Social comments on the failure of the fairness doctrine, he seems to blame Boomers here for being too conservative, but if anything the fairness doctrine has moved totally to the left such that the media is now totally captured by left-leaning politics.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Vietnam and the emerging Boomer identity</b></div><div dir="auto">27: "No survey of the Boomers can be complete without revisiting the Vietnam War and its upheavals, which defined early adulthood for all save the youngest Boomers." <b>[Again it's worth considering who duplicitously started Vietnam, who foolishly escalated it: those were "Silents" and "Greatest" generation members! But wait, I thought these were the idealized generation that this author celebrates? One of the more phony conflicts ever ginned up by the military industrial complex--which by the way was <i>also</i> created before the Boomers were out of grade school by these same supposedly superior generations the other looks longingly to.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">28: In a sentence that is guaranteed to make everybody mad, including Boomers, the author calls Vietnam "nothing special."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>30: It's clear that this author never read <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2009/05/best-and-brightest-by-david-halberstam.html" target="_blank">David Halberstam's <i>The Best and the Brightest</i></a>, he would have had a markedly different view of Vietnam--especially Kennedy's involvement in it--if he had.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">31: The author argues that while this was a mid-grade proxy war, again, "nothing special," the Boomers made it into t<i>he worst thing that ever happened</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>34ff: So far this chapter is all over the place. Boomers are terrible because of Vietnam (even though it wasn't Boomers that started it or lied about it or expanded it); Boomers take credit for Vietnam being the worst thing that ever happened; the author directly claims Boomers were the most militant generation that was hungry for war during the mid 1960s; and yet he also argues Boomers draft-dodged. Furthermore our country was divided over it (because of Boomers) and that's bad for some reason. So were Boomers for it, or against it? Which is it? I can't help but think of John Kerry's famous quote about the Iraq War "I was for it before I was against it"--this author appears to blame Boomers for likewise being for the Vietnam War before they were against it.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36ff: Criticizing William Westmoreland, the general with his constant "victory is imminent" claims: interestingly he was born in 1914, and certainly not a Boomer.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">37: The author cites Boomer hypocrisy that the young and better-educated who were in favor of the war had no expectation that they would be serving. <b>Note the logical inconsistency here, you can have an opinion about a war (everyone has opinions about everything) but not be responsible for that war. The people responsible for the war are at fault, not the people who have opinions one way or the other about the war.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38: Per the author Boomers gamed the system, favoring the war and using techniques of deferment to get out of it and then changing their opinions to <i>against</i> the war once it became clear that more and more of them would be drafted. He notes also that the draft system was exploitative and hurt disadvantaged groups. Meaning, somehow, that Boomers were even more hypocritical as a result. Weird logic here. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">42: This author really likes to fit things into his filter: the conscientious objector option should have been more appealing to Boomers but... "For sociopaths, however, CO was among the least desirable options, because it required sincerity, effort to secure the deferment, and some form of alternative service." For the man with a hammer everything is a nail...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44: Re: comments on army discipline here, I'd be extremely curious to know if this author has any direct context for military service or military history, or context for the difference between drafted vs volunteer military forces. I suspect not. But either way, in his eyes, Boomers remain sociopathic!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48: The author talks about 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords, when America "cut and ran" (his phrase). Again, who, precisely, cut and ran? Was it Boomers? No: it was the military and political leadership--none of whom were Boomers. Some strangely incontinent logic here on Boomer protests here too: The author also criticizes Boomers because their protests died away as the war wound down, but then he is strangely incontinent in his logic as he next argues that Boomer protests if they <i>did</i> help end the war, then subsequent protests would have negatively influenced the peace process; so either we can criticize Boomers because either they had an effect or they didn't. But the author concludes "Either way the Boomers didn't acquit themselves well." Hammer, nail.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">50: The author blames Boomers for the US government not accepting sufficient Vietnamese refugees, and specifically blames Jerry Brown (then governor of California) for protesting attempts at resettlement. But again Boomers did not make up the political leadership then: Jerry Brown is not a Boomer! He was born in 1938.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">50: Finally, the author concludes that Vietnam gave Boomers a final lesson that "they could get away with their misdeeds" and that they could have "consequence free sociopathy."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Empire of Self</b></div><div dir="auto">52: On the Boomer "counterculture" which the author blames on left ("antiwar, antistate, anticonformity") and right ("a rebellion against a big government and a regulatory welfare orthodoxy"), which makes little sense. This chapter appears to be a blanket criticism of Boomer improvidence, drugs, sex, rebellion, all stuff everyone already knows.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">56ff: The author also is beginning to appear no less self-absorbed and solipsistic than the Boomers he criticizes: can you really blame sexual excesses on Boomers? What about the 1920s (either the US or Germany), 18th century France... instead the author cites a 1968-era film that showed the first celluloid breasts. What?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59ff The author considers Boomer sexual "transgressiveness" and gratification as sociopathic.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60ff Divorce: basically Boomers didn't make it easy but they took advantage of it too much per the author. See for example this incontinent passage: "Easier divorce was certainly a social good--and one pioneered by earlier generations, not the Boomers. The frequency with which Boomers resorted to divorce, however, proved alarming and generationally unusual. It suggested some combination of growing impulsivity about entering a union, unwillingness to expend the effort necessary to make relationships work, and perhaps a fundamental incompatibility between an antisocial Boomer culture and the state of matrimony which, after all, is a society of two." [What a strange and ill-thought out argument: Easier divorce is good, but because the Boomers overused it, it's not good that they overused this thing which I just said is good. Does the author happen to know what level of divorce meets his test for being non-antisocial?]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">63: Citing Boomer deficits in self-control (beyond sexual and marital) to include "saving money" another thing that is "impossible" for the Boomers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">64ff: Now the author moves on to the most overt example of deficits in self-control: the obesity epidemic, which the author also blames on Boomers. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">66ff: Evidence-free section here about Boomer narcissism, including claiming that using electronics at the dinner table is more of a Boomer than a millennial habit, asserted with no evidence beyond a footnote to a random article.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Science and Sentimentality</b></div><div dir="auto">71ff Now we're blaming Boomers for eliminating "reality and reason." This chapter cites all kinds of examples of American stupidity: increasing illiteracy in domains like science, declining STEM degrees, attributing all of it to Boomers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>72: It's astonishing to read this sentence: "The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous." This is asserted with no evidence, just arm-waving, and ironically <i>in a chapter blaming Boomers for disposing of reason!</i> Interesting lack of self awareness...</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75ff Various symbols of science and wondrous progress from prior generations, ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Land Grant University system passed in 1862, the various world's fairs, Thomas Edison, Skyscrapers, etc., all of which are now replaced by "the forces of anti-empiricism" which according to the author come in "flavors": religious and natural.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">80ff Boomers are antiscience because they somehow caused R&D spending on non-defense science to decline from a peak in 1966 of 6% to around 3% for most of the 1970s; The author here also plays cite-a-study and cite-a-poll to come up with lots of examples of Boomers being stupid, ignorant, oblivious, sociopathic.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">83: It sounds like the author actually does not understand the term heliocentrism in the context of the history of science, as Copernicus wasn't technically right either with his heliocentric model: after all, the sun is not the center of the universe either, just as the geocentric model isn't correct. It's interesting to read a book where the author cites how scientifically ignorant boomers are while making what looks like to be a fundamentally basic scientific error. <b>Also note the hilariously specious footnote here on page 83 which discusses the lack of scientific understanding of Americans. "However, Europeans tend to defer to elites somewhat more than Smericans, and this neutralizes some of the effects of scientific illiteracy."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">85: "Having deposed empiricism, the Boomers were free to seek new sources of truth, and these they located in feelings, a commodity not in short supply during the age of Aquarius." The evidence the author offers to support this assertion is usage of the word "feel" (which allegedly grew dramatically in the mid-60s), plus the debut of the mood ring, also the usage of the word "true" declined. The author cites Google searches using Google Ngram here in the footnotes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>85ff: The author criticizes Boomers for not sufficiently obeying their elites. Note this opinion is radioactively obtuse now, after we've seen what our elites did to civilization with the COVID pandemic.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">91ff: Also note here where the author criticizes Boomers for their religious choices--and in this case, oddly enough, <i>following their religious elites too much.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Disco and the Roots of Neoliberalism</b></div><div dir="auto">96: "It's hard to take the disco decade seriously."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">98: "Neoliberal doctrine serves as the operating system of Boomer dominance and is so pervasive and damaging that it requires a chapter of its own. Many of the American policy calamities of the past decades have, as their animated source, some perverted fragment of neoliberal doctrine." Boomer liberalism as free market a la carte. Discussion of true liberalism, followed by neoliberalism.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104: Judging from the comments here about the Bretton Woods exchange system and the fixed exchange rate for gold at $35 an ounce it's appears this author has no idea that FDR seized Americans' gold in the 1930s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">108: Striking comment here about how Boomers "joined the capitalist class," were savvy in how they used inflation policy, but yet a couple of chapters ago, didn't the author argue that Boomers were improvidents who never saved?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>112: Another good example of an incontinent argument: "Early deregulation was generally good especially when accompanied by vigorous enforcement of other standards--it's one thing to deregulate the price of a plane ticket, it's another thing to abolish the Federal Aviation Administration." No one abolished the FAA, not even Boomers.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">114: The author's discussion of the Laffer Curve is embarrassing here, he exposes himself as innumerate. He also blames Boomers, somehow, for electing Reagan.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: The Boomer Ascendency</b></div><div dir="auto">116ff: "If the Boomers had been just another generation, their sociopathy would be merely lamentable, but demographics and history granted Boomers the power to reshape the nation in devastating ways." Here he criticizes Boomers for bending political power to meet their life cycle needs (although technically speaking we have to admit that this is literally what democracy is). The author also notes that Boomers decided that they wanted to keep all their old age benefits; Boomers might take sides in the culture wars but this is one thing that they all agree on, at the expense of everyone else.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">119ff On granting the vote to 18-year-old Boomers, an age where they didn't have the maturity or the civic knowledge to vote appropriately.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">124: It's also the Boomers fault that the drinking age was reduced to 18 (just like the voting age), although this political change couldn't possibly have been done by the Boomers alone.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">125 The author describes Boomers "colonizing the political landscape"--a really good turn of phrase. Then he discusses how even as they start to die off and are a less populous generation, the survivors can still form blocs, use filibusters, vetos, etc to stop new legislation and maintain their programs.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Taxes</b></div><div dir="auto">132: This chapter discusses the manipulation of taxes to serve Boomer generational ends which involved "constantly adjusting specific tax policies to favor the interests of Boomers as they moved through their financial life cycles, lowering income taxes during periods where Boomers labored for wages, reducing capital gains taxes as Boomers became stockholders, and limiting and even briefly abolishing estate taxes when Boomers expected to inherit. When Boomers perceived tax hikes to be in their interests, some rates (like Social Security and Medicare taxes) were allowed to rise, though only enough to benefit Boomers, many of whom can expect to retrieve more from the system than they put in, before the system falls apart as the Boomers die off."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">133ff Discussion of tax history, hikes and cuts, from Reagan on.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">151ff: Judging by the conclusions this author makes about the government's stable share of GDP regardless of where tax rates are (see chart on p 151), he concludes that it's just shifting the burden around, he's doesn't seem to be aware of how tax rates impact economic activity and the incremental economic decisions of taxpayers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">152: He also appears not to understand the money-printing component of government spending; also he exhibits basic confusion here between income and wealth while talking about "the rich"... Also he never addresses the "limit the rapid formation of new rich" component of tax policy (income taxes act as a limiter on big shifts of economic power by limiting the creation of new rich people). </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: Debt and Deficits</b></div><div dir="auto">155ff: Debt typically was at 50% of GDP from 1950 to 1980. If this guy was upset with our debt levels and debt to GDP ratios when he wrote this book in 2017, his head must be exploding now...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">162: Standard discussion here on there is no social security trust fund, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">172: Blaming Boomers for running up corporate debt levels too; I'd say this is the least of the things to worry about these days.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">173: Strange criticisms here of various Boomer politicians, ranging from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders to Marco Rubio for being impecunious and struggling with debt when objectively all of these people are incredibly wealthy; this author could have made a much more powerful argument like citing the unbelievable investing returns of Congressional rep and senators who can freely trade as government insiders! Hence fortunes like those in Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The latter third of this chapter really has nothing to do with Boomers directly</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Indefinitely Deferred Maintenance</b></div><div dir="auto">177ff Here the author frames the fact that the United States is not investing in its infrastructure, considering it as a metaphor for Boomers' impulsivity and squandering of resources; also Boomer sociopathy. Boomers "grew up in a country that had the world's greatest infrastructure, they now run a nation where infrastructure ranges from frustratingly backward to downright unsafe."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[I wonder if a more interesting question (more interesting than just blaming everything on Boomers) would be to ask <i>why</i> does infrastructure go through these cycles of neglect to the point where when an Empire actually goes through collapse to the point where in some civilizations people lose indoor plumbing. Further, where might we be on this spectrum right now, what inning? This author openly describes poisoned water, Flint Michigan, the fact that LaGuardia airport looks like a third world airport, etc.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">179ff The author makes an unnecessary and self-evident argument for having good infrastructure and having public goods; repetitive statistics on poor quality of roads, bridges, etc.; on the fact that we don't have train service to and from wherever this guy thinks we should, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186ff On defense spending (which this author considers infrastructure): the author claims the Boomers "squandered their martial inheritance." Strange that he argues that the Boomers decided not to invest in the military when military spending is objectively very high, despite the fact that we are not at war. Also worth noting that if you look at the US performance in our last few conflicts one might not think much of the return on all that spending.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">190ff On the vastly higher cost and time involved in building anything; major skyscrapers, bridges, etc. <b>[A pretty depressing quote here about how the original San Francisco Bay Bridge took three years to complete for $1.4 billion in today's dollars while the replacement of just the eastern span took <i>eleven</i> years at $6.5 billion dollars (again in today's dollars so the comparison is fair), and it required immediate repairs and has ongoing problems.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">191ff Blaming Boomers for NIMBYism; Boomers are acting out a "degraded version" of Jane Jacobs' efforts against Robert Moses.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>191-2: This author is unabashedly confident that his views on what we should do for the greater good are true and accurate, I guess he just doesn't see the irony.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Boomer Finance: The Vicious Cycle of Risk and Deceit</b></div><div dir="auto">194ff: "Boomers have engaged in a campaign of deceit... to offer consoling fictions to the population they govern" including "disingenuous financial dialogue essential to maintaining the expropriations necessary to fund the Boomers insatiable consumer appetites." He blames the Boomers for using various misleading labels to constrain political debate and all the electorate like law and order, or crisis management; "Boomer lies are systemic."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195ff The author appears to think that the generations before the Boomers used only accurate statistics, enacted appropriate regulation, etc., and that with the Boomers it's devolved into massive deregulation, deceitful Wall Street products, financialization of everything, off-balance sheet accounting, etc. We hear all about Enron, the S&L crisis, the LBO wave; even Boomer Carly Fiorina comes under fire for Hewlett-Packard's (admittedly) stupid acquisition of Compaq. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">202ff: Deregulation, elimination of Glass-Steagall; systematically blaming Boomers like Chuck Prince of Citigroup and Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase [with Dimon at least--setting aside his cluelessness about Bitcoin--he was the only one who ran a bank competently through the financial crisis... despite being a Boomer], see also Boomer Hank Paulson who was in the Treasury during the crisis, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">203: Some errors here that the author should know better than to make: claiming that the SEC relaxed bank capital requirements, that's not even close to the relevant agency.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">208ff On "monetary manipulation and generational expropriation"; the author is upset at the size of the Federal Reserve's unprecedented $3.5 trillion dollar expansion of its balance sheet ... I can't imagine what the author thinks now about the Fed's balance sheet now! The author wishes the Fed would use its margin requirement rules (which hasn't used for decades: current margin limitations play very little role in stock market volatility nowadays); this section now jumps to proforma accounting which has nothing to do with the Fed; also Boomers are blamed for the increase of the P/E ratio of the stock market making stocks now "too expensive" just in time for Boomers to get old and begin liquidating. [But wait, remember the author claimed improvident Boomers never saved?] Comments on the explosion in the price of housing as Boomers expanded housing subsidies, mortgage tax subsidies and house sale tax exclusions during their lives. Note also that the Fed intervened during the housing crisis to the benefit of Boomers [I think this is actually unlikely to be accurate: Boomers probably would not have been not the bulk of home buyers acquiring NINJA loan financed homes, although I haven't looked at specific data on this]. Note that there's no discussion here from the author (a private equity finance guy and thus a Cantillon insider) on monetary inflation policy, which harms everyone.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: The Brief Triumph of Long Retirement</b></div><div dir="auto">215ff: The long retirements of the Boomers were a historical anomaly: it used to be that only the rich could retire; various numbers on income needed to retire, most of which is specious, it appears this author never actually spent much time thinking about "retirement math"; old age benefit programs probably start to run out seriously in the mid-2030s just as median-age Boomers die off--and when it's too late to really be able to cut Boomers benefits.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">220: Pension plans as false friends, they're largely underfunded with overly optimistic return estimates; this is yet another example of Boomer deceit; standard self-evident discussion about how the PBCT doesn't have enough money to satisfy all unfunded future pension liabilities--that's because that's not what it's for.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>225: Unintentionally amusing blurb here mocking the old book <i>Dow 36,000</i>, remember this book was published in 2017. [Would you like to to take a guess what the Dow Jones Industrial Average is right now, as of Feb 15, 2024? It's at 38,467.31.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">226ff: Returning to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security again: a semantic debate or whether it's "welfare" or not; also a pointless discussion about who gets more than they paid in depending on the generation; rehashing now the worsening economics of the Social Security cash flows as more and more Boomers leave the workforce, again everyone knows this. And yet again another discussion of the fact that the trust fund is not a real thing, we've already covered the subject back in Chapter 9.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">230ff: In a section where the author offers his fixes for Social security, he spends most of his time bitching about how Boomers want to get what their gets what's theirs and how Boomers are not in all interested in or would consent to any fix... and then he offers the least creative solution possible (although it is at least a solution): a combination of cuts in benefits and increases in taxes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">233ff: Repeat discussion here, except now it's about Medicare and how Boomers can get all the Hep C treatments they want (because they partied too hard when they were young, the author snarkily claims), and they can get these treatment regardless of the cost, expropriating the funds from the rest of the system. Weird footnote here on page 235 about cryogenics; how Medicare is doomed, will be facing multitrillion dollar shortfalls, it will consume a tenth of GDP in 50 years, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: Preparing for the Future</b></div><div dir="auto">240: A "once upon a time" discussions on how the US used to care about the environment (until the Boomers came along); this is sort of a weird notion too, although the author makes a point lionizing Teddy Roosevelt and the Clean Air Act which was passed pre-Boomer; also Nixon creating the EPA; the author attributes waning environmental efforts to Boomers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">242: Note the footnote citing "environmental hypocrite Al Gore": see the complicated way he obtained land paying him oil extraction royalties; likewise the extraordinary amount of carbon he puts out with his private jetting around the planet and his gigantic mansion; global warming is "a problem compounded by Boomers like Gore" with their unrestrained consumerism.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">244: Boomers don't believe strongly enough in anthropocentric climate change.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">252ff: Boomers limit biotechnology research, they stopped stem cell research. Also a strange discussion here of AI and an even stranger footnote about the the author's believe that Skynet taking over the world is "a non-zero possibility."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Detention, After-School and Otherwise</b></div><div dir="auto">258ff: On how Boomers both degraded schools and swelled up prisons, making them both "mechanisms of mass containment and deferred liability." The author cites declining SAT scores and another declining academic metrics overlapping perfectly with the period Boomers took these tests [Ah, but who were running the schools, funding the schools, and running the municipalities that paid for the schools at this time?? The author repeatedly fails to see this--and to him it's still the Boomers' fault.] Boomers unwilling to tax themselves to furnish funds for education [although two pages later the author notes and a footnote the United States spends more per student than any other advanced country!!]; physical decay of schools and their infrastructure.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">270: The for-profit education industry is <i>also</i> the Boomers' fault. Boomers also taking up all the tenure-track jobs in academia, leaving just crappy adjunct teaching positions for everyone else.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>272ff: Also the explosion of student debt, which burdens everyone except for Boomers, is <i>also</i> somehow the Boomers' fault [!] and the author offers a rather tortured and indirect "reason" for this: that "the Boomer economy is so inadequate to the task of providing good jobs."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">275: The rapidly growing prison population is also the Boomers' fault because they favored ever stricter laws, they loved law and order; Boomer police forces grew [wait, is this the cause of the crime or a response to crime? Anyway, I thought Boomers didn't want to invest in any public goods?]. The author is careful to note that Boomer white collar offenders are never prosecuted. See also private prisons which have Boomer executives; the author notes the irony of how Boomers protested "the pigs" during the Vietnam war but have created a police state within the same generation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 15: The Wages of Sin</b></div><div dir="auto">282ff This is a chapter starts by discussing Boomer ostentatiousness, that they are luxury voyeurs, this despite the author's previous assertions that they were impecunious and improvident; the author also believes that "In the 1950s, rich Americans knew better than to flaunt wealth." [But he never did take his perspective back to, say, the teens or twenties which were as ostentatious as any Boomer era. See also some profound ostentation even in the 1930s <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-odds-against-me-by-john-scarne.html" target="_blank">from the many wild stories of John Scarne's autobiography</a>.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">284ff: On the fact that GDP growth has stagnated, that there's an output gap with the economy; this is also the Boomers' fault; Boomer extraction of wealth from other generations helps explain this according to the author.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">296ff: Growth in monopolies and oligopolies under the Boomers; a decline an antitrust regulation, the growth of megafirms.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 16: The Myth of Boomer Goodness</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>301: Interesting quote here opening Chapter 16: "It would be gratifying if the Boomers admitted their mistakes wholesale and ceded power to other groups." [I wonder if this quote reveals more about the author than about reality, there are lots of things we all want that will never happen, that can never happen. What can be gained by going around demanding reality be other than it is?]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">301ff This chapter is about how Boomers see themselves as good people who do not need to explain themselves, do not need to apologize, that they're special, and that they're more moral and generally more deserving as a result. The author even admits he himself was fooled into believing the "good people" propaganda of the Boomer generation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">306ff: Criticizing Boomers for limitations to voting rights--which, according to the author happened in 2013 thanks to Boomer Supreme Court justices; this portion of the chapter is pretty weak, author doesn't give a lot of concrete examples of how voting rights were limited and he has a strange obsession with reversing the laws that do not allow felons to vote.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">310ff Blaming the existence big money politics on the Boomers; their use of corporate donors.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">314ff: Blaming any kind of court decision that the author doesn't like on Boomers: the author uses his availability heuristic to think of all kinds of court decisions that appall him, he then blames those decisions on Boomers because most judges are Boomers during this time.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">316ff Another example of "illusory goodness" of Boomers is how they don't pay women equally; although note due to Boomers women got much more access to the workforce and it's kind of unusual to consider it unfair to say that Boomers are responsible for unfair pay that they are paying themselves.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">317ff Continued list of sins of Boomers: they're not sufficiently in favor of LGBT rights, they're not sufficiently in favor of racial intermarriage <b>[these seem just like strange things to be blaming Boomers for, the author comes off as totally obsessed with Boomers. I think you could very easily make the exact opposite case here: that Boomers presided over a period of immense tilting towards rights for marginalized groups. The author also will grudgingly admit that some major advances in equality for disabled persons occurred under the Boomers watch, but just wait! The author blames Boomers anyway because George W. Bush broadened the definition of "disability" which diluted the benefits to <i>truly</i> disabled people, according to this author. Again this is just incontinent and obsessive.]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">323ff Blaming Boomers for warlike behavior, referring to our recent "endless wars" period. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 17: Price Tags and Prescriptions</b></div><div dir="auto">327ff Here's where the author gives his "solutions" for fixing Boomer America. Unsurprisingly it involves taxing and spending much much more on projects the author wants; <b>the author does not seem to see the irony here of his generation and generations to follow spending other peoples' money on things <i>they</i> think are important, when he just spent an entire book lambasting Boomers for spending tax money on the things Boomers wanted.</b> The bill for this, according to the author, is $8.65 trillion up front with $1.17 trillion in ongoing (I guess he means annual) costs. Spending on infrastructure, refilling pension gaps, spending more even more on the military, spending $1.5 trillion on education and [predictably] spending a trillion dollars on climate; also fixing Social security, etc. taxing estates much more aggressively; overt rationing of healthcare. [There is a tremendous quantity of words in this chapter, it is a word salad with very little specific, practical or even plausible ideas.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Afterword</b></div><div dir="auto">348: This chapter is actually somewhat disturbing, he talks about deposing Boomers using metaphors like putting heretics to the sword [see the note for page 350 below]; this is quite a strange and downright creepy chapter.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>349: Another absolutely strange quote right here that sounds like something right out of the Goebbels handbook:</b> "Part of my goal throughout has obviously been to establish Boomers as a highly culpable Other, one whose deposition might lead to some real good. Boomers really are different, as they often and proudly remind. They do not share other generations' values and do not behave in ways that accord with America's better conceptions of itself. They are Other, even, in their own ways, enemies of state and society."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">350ff: The author, weirdly, brings up the Cathar heretics in Medieval era Church history, arguing that the Boomers are similarly heretics and further suggesting that they should all be put to the sword because of their heresy [!] A couple of sentences later the author writes, "not all boomers are sociopaths, and not all of them deserve to be condemned." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">364: Finally, a shockingly oblivious quote here in the author's acknowledgments: "Even after decades of Boomer neglect and hostility, <b>no bureaucracy is as committed to making a nation as transparent to itself as the American bureaucracy."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Simon Schama: <i>Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution</i> </div><div dir="auto">David Mamet: <i>The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture</i></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-75981843991056504422024-02-12T17:34:00.000-08:002024-02-12T17:38:39.788-08:00Bear Market Investment Strategies by Harry Schultz<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">Yet another investing book that came out at precisely the wrong time. Precisely! But it might be useful now.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Bear Market Investment Strategies</i> was published in 1981, a bare year and change before the greatest of all bull markets, 1983-2000, during which the DJIA increased some 13 times. In other words, this book helped you navigate the stock market environment that just ended, not the one that was coming.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">There are a variety of reasons investing books come out at exactly the wrong time. It takes years for an investing strategy to prove itself, and once that happens, it takes even more time to write a book, find a publisher, design it, print it, etc. By the time a book finds you, it is more likely to tell you what <i>not</i> to do, not what to do. (If you're curious about this appalling phenomenon in investment book publishing, <a href="https://youtu.be/ODl9-JDX8_4?si=vOlZ1rf1ycr5OrvN" target="_blank">take a look at this video on my investing channel</a>.)</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">Now, this doesn't make this book entirely useless. In fact, as I've explained elsewhere in this blog (in a review of <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2011/01/gorilla-game-by-geoffrey-moore.html" target="_blank">another investing book published at precisely the wrong time</a>), books like this can be incredibly useful <i>if read outside of their era</i>. To see what I mean, have a look at this quote, stating author Harry Schultz's central theme:</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><i>"Because of monetary chaos, rampant inflation, deficit spending, and government intervention in markets and economies, one can no longer find stable markets nor use 1950s methods. Today we must be a good deal more flexible."</i><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto">Tell me: does this seem to rhyme at all with the current era? Eerie, isn't it? Thus perhaps we have the kind of book that might give a modern reader a decent game plan for handling <i>this</i> investing environment. Of course we won't know until later, but I think there's a good shot that it will.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">On to some criticisms, as this book is uneven in places. The last third of the book feels phoned in, with chapters that read like partially finished blog posts and listicles. The level of sophistication expected of the reader isn't consistent: some topics are laid out for the general reader, while other highly advanced investing topics (like nuances of futures and options trading to choose an obvious example) are discussed <i>without</i> context at levels far too advanced for the general reader. Finally there's a surfeit of on the one hand/on the other hand-type predictions late in the book that are useless, including this howler: "I can only say that such a depression is highly possible, whether or not it is likely."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, the author should have included a bibliography. He cites various important stock market authors throughout the text, but almost <i>never</i> cites their specific works. This leaves the reader dependent on their own Google-fu to figure out which books are worth exploring next. Never fear! I created an ersatz bibliography at the bottom of this post for anyone interested in what turns out to be quite a decent investment reading list.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Once again:</b> <i>never read any recently published investment book, except for contrarian reasons.</i> Instead, seek out books from prior eras, and build yourself a mental library of context for how to deal with a broad range of investment environments.</div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface:</b></div><div dir="auto">ix: "Man is escapist. His primitive fight or flight mechanism instinctively urges him to flee if at all possible. In the modern world, he tends to do this on a mental rather than a physical level." [Useful insight here: People will do things to reduce discomfort, often at the expense of their capital! The market's crashing and you sell just to end the pain of loss, but of course this usually ends up being a poor decision as you tend to sell at the bottom, at the point of maximum pain.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">x: In the modern era there's no escape real way to really bypass the economic system, "you must learn to profit from the system itself." You're in an inflationary environment, or you're in an economic downturn, you need to figure out what investments will and won't work in those environments and adapt. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">x: "...in a real depression, particularly of the inflationary variety, the only way to keep fairly liquid and at the same time be investing with the trend is to go short."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section I: The Bear Background</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Definitions, Guidelines, and Term Limitations</b></div><div dir="auto">3: Contrasting today [meaning the 1970s] from the 1950s and 1960s, "where it was only necessary to put your assets into blue chips and watch them appreciate year after year."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4: "Inflation... shortens the view not only of the stock market trader but the businessman as well." On the market being flat for more than a decade, crushing you if you held on because of inflation and currency depreciation; but if you had traded the moves along the way [here he cites the 45% decline in the Dow from 1973-75 and the 25% decline from 1976-78] "you would have done much better." [Of course if it were all so easy...] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5: "Be not a bull, nor a bear, but a realist"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6ff: Defending short selling, arguing it's not unpatriotic, citing Joe Kennedy, note also his hilariously fallacious justification on page 7: "If there was anything unethical, immoral, or un-American about it, the Securities and Exchange Commission wouldn't allow it." Tell that to Bernie Madoff's clients, or better yet, tell it to US pharma regulators!!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9: On the usefulness of downturns: "Humans don't seem to be able to cope with prosperity--as individuals or as a nation--so the cutting-down-to-size process comes along to force a return to more important values again."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9: On false prophets during depressions, recessions and bear markets; politicians that won't reveal the weakness in the economy; see also pundits who foresee great prosperity coming, etc. [It's reminiscent of how the US government basically redefined away the recession that happened in 2022 so there therefore <i>was</i> no recession.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10: On thinking "contra" and using automatic skepticism; doubt as a device to preserve your capital. Politicians or business leaders may or may not be right, but most of the time they're wrong and you want to think contrarian in general.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12ff: Interesting quote here from Charles Dow from back in 1900, talking about action and reaction, and how a swing in a stock or the market tends to be followed by a relapse about half the size of the prior move. "It often rallies or relapses more than half of the original swing, but it is generally safe to wait for about half." The author deduces from this to watch the contra-swing, in a rising market, then, if that swing sits above the 50%/halfway level odds are that the highs will again be approached or beaten, if there's a major advance and the contrast swing goes below this half/50% level then the primary direction is bearish and downward and the lows will be approached or beaten. [You definitely see fractals of this type of action/reaction in many fields, not just in the stock market.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13: "One must act contrary to the majority view--at the proper time and in the proper way."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: The Bear Market, History</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>17ff: The author gives a useful historical rundown of bear markets, their decline and duration:</b></div><div dir="auto">1900: DJIA down 31.8%, 12 months duration</div><div dir="auto">1903 down 37.7%, 10 months</div><div dir="auto">1907 down 45.0%, 10 months, two phases, panic of 1907</div><div dir="auto">1909 down 26.2%, 8 months</div><div dir="auto">1912 down 23.5%, duration 26 months (December 1914 was the low and the stock market was closed for 4 months in 1914 so there's no true picture of the decline here)</div><div dir="auto">1917 down 40.1% duration 13 months</div><div dir="auto">1919 down 46.6% duration 21 months (note also a one-year depression began in the fall of 1920)</div><div dir="auto">1923 down 18.6% duration 7 months</div><div dir="auto">1926 down 16.6% duration 2 months, these last two were baby bear markets</div><div dir="auto">1929 down 90.0% duration 34 months, six successive crashes into 1932 followed by a new bull market almost immediately</div><div dir="auto">1934 down 24.1% duration 9 months</div><div dir="auto">1937 down 51.8% duration 56 months, with five crash phases running up until April 1942, note also the 1941-42 period was the longest bear market non-stop downswing in history, 7 1/2 months.</div><div dir="auto">1946 down 24.6% duration 37 months, followed by the great bull market in 1949 to 1961, where the Dow went from 160 to 741, "its most speculative orgy of the century."</div><div dir="auto">1953 down 13.9% duration 9 months</div><div dir="auto">1957 down 20.3% duration 6 months</div><div dir="auto">1960 down 18% duration 10 months</div><div dir="auto">1962 down 29% duration 6 months</div><div dir="auto">1966 down 26.6%, 8 months</div><div dir="auto">1968 down 36.9% over 17 months, "the first of the new-era bear markets"</div><div dir="auto">1973 "a whopper!" Down 46.6% over 23 months, this was due to the oil crisis</div><div dir="auto">1977 down 26.4%, duration 14 months, nothing dramatic caused it, just the same problems from earlier in the decade</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>22: Thus we have 21 bear markets across 79 years, meaning a bear market every 3-4 years on average, "The longest time span between bear markets was six years." The author's message here is "Bear markets are frequent enough to make it impossible to avoid them or to avoid their losses. Thus, the investor <i>must</i> try to understand bear markets better. Otherwise, the profits from the previous bull market are usually wiped out."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22: "The average investor is pitifully enough equipped for bull market gyrations and virtually a babe in the woods in bear markets. He seems willing to stay that way because of the strange notion that bear markets are rare, minor, and/or impossible to understand anyway." <b>[As much as most investors--including me!--don't want to hear this and feel condescended to when hearing this, the first step towards becoming a better investor is to be able to swallow things like this and use it as fuel keep learning.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23: Also note that non-blue chip stocks (here he's talking about names that aren't in the DJIA) can easily fall twice as much as names in the index. "...historically most stocks lose half their value in the average bear market." [Note also there is no such thing as an "average" in domains like this!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23: Bear market durations range from as short as two months to as long as five years. A lot of bear markets are very short in duration, but note that we spent over one third of the 20h century (!) in bear markets, this indicates how dangerous the stock market can be. Also: <b>"...by the time [investors] recognize a bull market is present, it is half gone."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">24-5: Comments on the recovery period after a bear market: 1929 required 26 years (!) to recover to its previous high; 14 years required after the 1937 crash; two other bear markets required nine years to get back to prior highs; most others had drawdowns of one to six years. <b>Also worth noting the average time between the initial crash and the final bear market low averages around 11-12 months with a range of 5 to 35 months.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">25-6: Interesting comments (although the author doesn't phrase it this way) about the arrow of history looked at from retrospect versus looked at from market/media reports at the time: the 1929 crash had very few prior bear markets to compare to for people in those days, people were oblivious to how serious it ultimately would be. And yet note that <b>"Between 1854 and 1933 the United States suffered precisely 21 depressions."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">26: On the notion of playing both sides of the roulette wheel, black and red, going long or short "as circumstances warrant." [Obviously the idea here is to gain more tools to make you a better all-weather investor, so you can function in more market environments.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section II: Economic Setting for Bear Markets</b></div><div dir="auto">27: Great example of the author's "contra thinking" right here, see photo:</div><div dir="auto"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwzuG8CZkeuqLvdcx0tpx6qeYD8ARqNTkaeGwbKesLDumeSsle3QyhGA9YFKe5FycAqEmb-c95uHQL1XOooK_nuKOX5PHYO_6SnQroXae0mW_HnRCw0w2Qo7g9cqwLwTMpbV6HOP9gERMHeQfDE9j9hf8QjCeJb_HOsq7CqdXUi0MEvh1L5ZNSkgMyCtqi/s3236/IMG_20240101_081610817.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2269" data-original-width="3236" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwzuG8CZkeuqLvdcx0tpx6qeYD8ARqNTkaeGwbKesLDumeSsle3QyhGA9YFKe5FycAqEmb-c95uHQL1XOooK_nuKOX5PHYO_6SnQroXae0mW_HnRCw0w2Qo7g9cqwLwTMpbV6HOP9gERMHeQfDE9j9hf8QjCeJb_HOsq7CqdXUi0MEvh1L5ZNSkgMyCtqi/w640-h448/IMG_20240101_081610817.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"The story has long been told of a steel magnate who looked out of his office window at the rows of smoking factory chimneys, contemplated the healthy pile of unfilled orders on his desk, sent a memorandum to his production assistant to hire a hundred more men, and called his stockbroker to sell all the stocks he owned. "Are you crazy or something?" asked the broker. "No," came the reply. "In all my years the future for our business has never looked as good as it does right now. Therefore I must assume that from now on it can only look worse."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Milestones, Guideposts of the Times</b></div><div dir="auto">29: On distortions in the cycles due to regulations, government interference, other factors, etc., with the result that business cycles "ain't what they used to be."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>30ff: Signs that a bull market is ending:</b></div><div dir="auto">* Commodity prices move up sharply, this is an "essential" clue according to the author</div><div dir="auto">* Stock price overvaluation: the author here uses yield to define/describe overvaluation, at yields under 3% is things are getting overpriced and if they hit 2.5% to even 2%, "the more certain you can feel that there's a bear around the corner." [This is one of those cues that may be less useful in today's markets, but it's still probably worth paying attention to the yield of the S&P500 with these numbers in mind]</div><div dir="auto">* Strikes in the labor market</div><div dir="auto">* High industrial production (note the stock market sells off well before the business sector reflects worsening conditions)</div><div dir="auto">* Labor shortages</div><div dir="auto">* Credit overexpansion (you can see this with too many IPOs for example)</div><div dir="auto">* Splits and secondaries (secondaries can also reflect dumping by experienced investors)</div><div dir="auto">* Public interest: the public is participating heavily in the market and the market is on the front page</div><div dir="auto">* An abundance of confidence</div><div dir="auto">* Inventories are high (obviously this indicator is for a past era, not for today when the world is increasingly full of inventoryless internet companies!)</div><div dir="auto">* The real estate market gets hot and people speculate in it</div><div dir="auto">* Churning in the stock market, volume is high but prices stay the same</div><div dir="auto">* Unanimity of bullish forecasts</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>34ff: Signs that a bear market is drawing to a close:</b></div><div dir="auto">* Bad news is abundant</div><div dir="auto">* Very few strikes</div><div dir="auto">* Stock market volume is low and at low valuations</div><div dir="auto">* Confidence is low</div><div dir="auto">* Commodity prices are low [note here the author doesn't discuss at all how commodity cycles have a completely different and much longer periodicity than stock market cycles]</div><div dir="auto">* Government bond prices become popular and yields are low (bond prices are high)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">35: Bear phases: the author quotes Robert Rhea here (author of <i>The Dow Theory</i>): <b>"Bear markets seem to be divided into three phases: the first being the abandonment of hopes upon which the final operation of the proceeding bull market was predicated; the second being the reflection of the decreased earning power and reduction of dividends; and the third representing distressed liquidation of securities which must be sold to meet living expenses. Each of these phases seems to be divided by a secondary reaction which is often erroneously assumed to be the beginning of a bull market."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36: More discussion here of inventory running low, on orders and shipment of goods; a lot of this stuff is less applicable today to the kinds of companies that dominate today's stock market; today's market certainly has industrial stocks, but increasingly "virtual" companies tend to dominate stock markets today.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">37: On watching your emotions: warning the reader not to let your own feelings or prejudices at the moment cause you to misread the situation, or expect too many "signs" (see notes to page 30-34 above) to tell you what's going to happen. If you're prepared and have awareness of all of the potential bull market/bear market signs above, then when you read or hear a fact of the changing economy you'll be able to interpret it immediately, <b>"you know what to look for and you recognize it for what it is."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>38: "The market always does what it should but not <i>when</i> it should." [Great, great quote]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Fads and Foreign Investment</b></div><div dir="auto">41-2: On noticing the difference between new concepts and new ideas and fads; fads are indicators of a bear market; they increase towards the end of bull markets. See investment trusts or the Florida land craze, both in the 1920s. <b>[Pre-GFC we might cite homes bought with ARMs, two years ago maybe we might cite SPACs or PE-funded names]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44-5: Comments here on the interconnectedness of the economy and world stock markets; a house of cards, it all falls down together, pockets of prosperity are rare. Good to remember. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section III: Technical Structure of Bear Markets</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Secondary Reactions</b></div><div dir="auto">49: "Every leg down in a bear market is interrupted by a secondary reaction, which may come in two or three phases or little legs." A "reaction" would be an up move in a bearish market; <b>these secondary reactions can give people a chance to get out, or go short.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">50ff: Secondary reactions/contra moves as a perplexing phenomenon; in a bear market this would be an upward move against the prevailing primary downward trend; this corrects a primary market movement that went too far in one direction, it also dampens any speculative activity of traders following this trend; these movements tend to be more violent than the primary trend (for example a three week bear market rally could retrace 30-60% of the primary trend); these bounces spring from no visible base or area of support; they have a "turn on a dime appearance" because the market is short-term oversold.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">53: On "dullness" in markets: in a bull market trend, dullness is followed by advances, hence the phrase "never sell a dull market"; in bear markets dullness is followed by more declines.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54: Long-term investors can ignore the secondary reactions; however, the author thinks it's worth trying to catch them because some reactions can retrace as much as two-thirds of the prior move.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55: On the psychology of these reactions: bullish investors think any price is a bargain if it's lower, also anybody who is short will cover, so you can get quite a bit of bullish short-term activity at times in bear markets; also anyone who bought at lower prices before the reaction has seen nice gains, thus they may want to book them; further, short sellers may "reload"; these latter factors bring the reaction rally to an end.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">56: Debates about average size of a reaction: the general rule is 1/3 to 2/3 of the ground lost, but the range can really be as little as 10% or as much as 99.9%. <b>[Again, there is no such thing as an average return! This part of the analysis sounds so fat-tailed and so non-gaussian that it's probably worthless to think too much about it]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57: Amusing here to see the comments on odd lot buying, this used to be a big deal but now it's utterly irrelevant to today's low- or no-commission investment world.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Bear Legs Helpful for Getting Your Bearings</b></div><div dir="auto">59ff: On "legs" or phases of bear markets; they tend to be compressed and more dramatic than phases of bull markets. "Legs" have less volume than the actual panic declines or crashes; different bear markets have different numbers of legs: typically it's three but the 1929 bear market had eight; they're just a way of keeping track of the perspective: whenever there's a market move in a new direction, and that move grinds to a halt and you hear talk that the primary move "is over" you can just assume there's going to be another "leg" in that same direction. The point here is that markets have waves [we could also call them fractals]; see also Elliott Wave theory.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">63: "Because nothing is certain in the market, you must always assume it's possible for a reversal to take place." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>63: "...somehow people in the market find it hard to turn their thinking upside down to apply normal rules in reverse during bear markets."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section IV: Tools and Gauges for Measuring Market Might</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: Weapons for the Bear War</b></div><div dir="auto">67ff: Interesting epistemic discussion here during a discussion of fundamental analysis versus technical analysis: the author argues that with fundamental analysis you never know whether you even have all the necessary facts <b>[actually I would argue this is untrue: <i>you always know that you do not have all of the necessary facts</i>! Note that is a critical stage for investors to reach: if you can recognize how little you know and how little can be known, and can handle the discomfort of the fact that you're investing with maybe 20-30% of the necessary information--and you cannot have more--you have leveled up in epistemic sophistication as an investor]</b>. Note also that technical (price, volume, charting, etc) information is much more ludic, it is much more visible: the index "tells you what it tells you" the stock chart tells you what it tells you, etc. the author says "You do know that what you know about a specific index reading is all there is to know. There is no more. You can be sure nothing has gotten by you." <b>[This is quite fascinating: on one level he's right, the technical indicators are right there and observable, the numbers are the numbers. But on another level it's not right, because the system is recursive and everyone else is looking at those indicators and making their own inferences and decisions.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>68: Useful meta-insight on knowing your tools: "It's usually better to know a tool well--even though you may surmise it's not the best tool available--than to use a great many tools that time prevents you from getting to know like a brother. It's like an artist with an old brush. He knows there are better, newer brushes, but he knows what he can do with the old one."</b> [The author then goes on to say, oddly, you want to use as many indicators as you can handle, in any case not less than 10.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">69ff: On creating your own personal index, a weighted vote of your various indicators and tools [this section has a lot of extreme "precisely wrong" precision that's unjustified here]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>70ff: Here's a list of 18 basic tools:</b></div><div dir="auto">* The advance-decline line ("this is surely the most basic and important tool of them all." and "Observe the way in which it diverges from the averages.")</div><div dir="auto">*New highs/new lows (nuance here on using a moving average of up to 5 or even 10 days to smooth things)</div><div dir="auto">* Odd lot balance index (divide daily odd lot purchases total into daily odd lots sales, if it's above 100%, it means the "little man" is selling more shares than he buys, "pros often sell when the little man suddenly buys or buy when the odd lotter suddenly sells")</div><div dir="auto">* Odd lot trading ratio (add odd lot sales and buys together and divide by total market volume for the day, then cut the answer in half because market volume represents both sales and purchases; the result is a figure between 7-13%, normally it's 10%, it shows to what extent the public is in the market or the faddishness of the stock market; a low number is bullish)</div><div dir="auto">* Odd lot short sales index (when "little people" are shorting on a big scale it is very bullish)</div><div dir="auto">* Volume (there's some 25 different ways to measure volume but it's also incredibly important to measure and understand, per the author; <b>note also the comments here from Joseph Granville about early selling happens on low volume as professionals take action, but then there's a selling climax when the public gets more and more frightened and starts dumping everything. Recognizing this climax is a sign for a technical rebound and professionals can now start buying)</b></div><div dir="auto">* DJIA 30 week moving average: ("Generally the 30-week moving average stays above the current price in bear markets, below it in bull markets. It gives cues and clues when the price attempts to penetrate the moving average. If a penetration lasts for several weeks, it tends to be regarded as a valid signal.")</div><div dir="auto">* Overbought-oversold index (there are many forms of this index, the most popular is a 10-day moving average of the difference between advances and declines)</div><div dir="auto">* Confidence index: this is from Barron's, it's the ratio between the yield on high risk and low risk bonds and it "supposedly shows the thinking of the elite money minds" (the author is suspicious of this indicator)</div><div dir="auto">* Short interest: all sales sold short need to be bought back someday; also pay attention to arbitrage positions which can skew this number: arbs may be put on that have nothing to do with being bearish; note also that arbs can easily amount to 5% or even 10% of the market's total short sales</div><div dir="auto">* Short interest ratio: short interest divided by current average daily volume: if it's large (2% or higher) this is bullish because they are too many shorts for the amount of daily volume; when it's small (1% or below) it's bearish; this is an imperfect indicator per the author</div><div dir="auto">* Brokers free credit balance index: this is a measure of money held in customer brokerage accounts, it indicates latent buying power. "It tells us, rather reliably, what stage of a bull or bear market we are in."</div><div dir="auto">* Debit balances index (the Siamese twin of the above index): this is money owed to brokers in margin accounts, it represents shrewder traders, this indicator rises during the first two stages of bull markets and then drops steadily through the bear market following</div><div dir="auto">* American Stock Exchange indexes: reflects some more speculative aspects of Wall Street, "Blue chips alone never made a market." Also watch for disparity between the AMEX and the NYSE, the AMEX has to go along with the New York Stock Exchange or "it's no show" per the author; also the AMEX tends to top out and go into a decline before the NYSE, thus giving an important preview</div><div dir="auto">* Resistance index: if the market is up, subtract the total issues advancing from the issues traded, then divide the figure by the issues traded total, if the market is down do the same thing using declines; this percentage represents "resistance" to whatever the market is doing. Resistance levels of 30-60% are typical and when it leaps or falls to touch either of these extremes it is "showing resistance"</div><div dir="auto">* Leadership index: the average price of daily volume leaders, this is the indicator of the leadership of the stock market and if it falls on upswings or rises on downswings this is bearish</div><div dir="auto">* Percent of advances index: divide the daily advances by the issues traded. This is another way of approaching the overbought-oversold problem</div><div dir="auto">* Gold shares index: if shares of gold-related companies rise with the Dow Jones Industrials this is bearish; this index is not as reliable as it was in the 1950s 60s pre-currency crises</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">81ff: The author here gives a list of his "personal original indices" including: DJIA 10-day moving average of internal volume, DJIA resistance, DJIA volume ratio (measures the volume of blue chips as a percent of the market total volume), advance-decline 200-day line, American Stock Exchange volume leaders, foreign stocks etc, many of these things are not applicable in this era, some 40 years later.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">82-3: On the interconnectedness of global business climate, the business world and the stock market, whether Iran explodes into violence or whether Saudi Arabia does something, etc., many of these things really rhyme with today. See also this quote: "There was a time when life was simple. The New York market seemed as though it would climb forever. The dollar was sound, beyond reproach, and convertible into gold. The United States was the undisputed ruler of the free world. The times have changed." [Holy cow have they ever.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>84: On the dividend yield of the Dow Jones Industrial Average at bear market bottoms and other turning points: "It is one of our safest, if not best, indicators."</b> At the 1929 peak the Dow average yield was 3.3%, at the crash low two months later the yield was 5.2%, yet that yield ultimately went to 10.3%. [Note also, I have successfully used a dividend yield heuristic for industrial and materials stocks: if they ever get to a yield of more than 4% and the company has the balance sheet and the cash flow characteristics to maintain that dividend, then it's a good time to get started buying. I think you can also use this heuristic for mature technology companies like Taiwan Semiconductor, Analog Devices, etc.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">87: Good insight here on waiting for a high-percentage play: the author here talks about having your various indicators heavily weighted in your favor; the idea here is to wait to really put money into a stock or sector if there is significant significant upside that you think is highly, highly probable; all of this is just a way of rephrasing Buffett's saying about "waiting for the fat pitch."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">88: Interesting blurb here where the author talks about how the DJIA is less important compared to other indexes and then goes on to say how in the late 1970s a lot of over-the-counter stocks were up a lot while the Dow was moving sideways, "thus distorting the picture of great opportunity that existed in a large area of shares--but that got almost no publicity." Interesting nuance there on the late 70s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">96: Note the photo below of a list of names from American Stock Exchange in this book's day: </div><div dir="auto"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhI9Y4OkG0_sWu2PMp8n1PMXI02XClrMPcY05fTh_WUxfIa77cE2NryFrGSqwG0YGQchpeh1iEYV2jMaYnwz2IABDb4NVZUD7SQG0g7cFsjz0PRjS4rPLLNahhxGuKBrvqWoIAjLrFqIyZcynqouxMzH0rm6rQSp4UXHJNao6GpuCozWZ_Whw22bU4FT7-/s2922/IMG_20240102_084856803.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2817" data-original-width="2922" height="618" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhI9Y4OkG0_sWu2PMp8n1PMXI02XClrMPcY05fTh_WUxfIa77cE2NryFrGSqwG0YGQchpeh1iEYV2jMaYnwz2IABDb4NVZUD7SQG0g7cFsjz0PRjS4rPLLNahhxGuKBrvqWoIAjLrFqIyZcynqouxMzH0rm6rQSp4UXHJNao6GpuCozWZ_Whw22bU4FT7-/w640-h618/IMG_20240102_084856803.jpg" width="640" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It is horrifying how few of these names not only no longer exist, but worse, that <i>no one has ever heard of most of these companies</i>. <b>The takeaway here is to understand how cruel creative destruction and market competition can be, and how so few companies actually make it long-term.</b> This image ought to sit in the back of every investor's mind!</div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Tools That "Change Shape" in Bear Markets</b></div><div dir="auto">103: Some indicators have to be looked at differently in different environments: see for example the overbought-oversold index, which can go all over the place during bear markets without meaning much (and it will thus mislead you into thinking a market turn is coming). See also the short interest indicators which indicate support under the market in bull markets, but may not indicate anything in bear markets because the short positions might remain in place for years (some people put on shorts and have no urgency to cover). As a result "many an amateur can be misled into buying when short interest climbs to its first new high in a bear market."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105: The author's point here is not to point out every single nuance with every indicator, but rather to get readers to recognize that there are no fixed rules here: you have to be flexible with different indicators in different environments.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">106: "History shows that bear markets tend to last a third to half as long as their preceding bull market." [Note that this most certainly did not hold true for the 2000 tech crash (3-ish years) after the 1983-2000 bull market (17 years), and it didn't hold true even across the various fractal mini-bear markets that happened during that period either, like the very brief 1987 crash or the 1989-1991 recession.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: The Validity of Cycles</b></div><div dir="auto">109ff: "Numerous economists and others have looked back in retrospect, found an apparently recurring historical pattern, and projected it forward. It has seldom worked." See Kondratiev and his Cycle Theory for example, which was not predictive in 1970 despite a supposed 50-year cycle. "Life is not a mathematically recurring phenomenon but a dynamic ongoing process... it is very difficult to equate past errors exactly with our own." See also technological revolutions: the author cites the computer as a key example but also cars versus horses or hand farming wheat versus scaled and mechanized farming; thus cycles with these types of huge innovations can't be compared... I am simply saying that the use of the past as a projection for the future can only be done in a very loose sense and that we can never expect an exact duplication of a past event the second time around, which is the principle of true cycles study."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">112: Another interesting example of the complete lack of parallels between eras: the United States has 15% of its population working for the government, and if you add unemployment figures to that we have non-cyclical employment running at about 20%. Recall that when unemployment hit 20% in the 1930s there was a depression! The government wasn't providing welfare and the economy collapsed. Yet currently we have a relatively prosperous country and 20% of the population is not producing (technically speaking) and is supported by the rest. The author's point here is how technological innovation of the private sector enables tremendous support of the public sector.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">113: On parallels that can be drawn from one era to the next, they can't be superimposed blindly, but human reactions tend to be similar in similar circumstances. The issue with cycle research is that it tends to apply the cycles too exactly, too precisely.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Chart Interpretation</b></div><div dir="auto">A review here of Dow Theory: whenever the DJIA moves to a new rally high or low the Dow Jones Transportation Average must do the same shortly thereafter, thus confirming the move, or else the move is false and cannot be sustained and a reverse will follow. Also vice versa if the transports make the first move. [This is also less applicable in today's tech-heavy Magnificent 7/FAANG market.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">120ff: On charting: recommending Robert D. Edwards and John Magee's book: <i>Technical Analysis of Stock Trends</i>. "People patterns are what you really see on a chart, not the stock alone. [It's kind of wild to think back in those days these dudes would make these charts by hand!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">122ff: Amusingly abstruse discussion here on whether to use arithmetical graph paper or semi-logarithmic graph paper; the author thinks that people think in terms of "Dow points" rather than percentages and so if the Dow moves 10 points it has the same feel whether it's from 800 to 810 or 900 to 910 although technically the move percentage-wise is greater at the lower level. [I wonder how he would think about this for the Dow is at 38,000 today... you can't even <i>feel</i> a 10 (or even a 100) point move with 38,000 as the denominator]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section V: Money-Making Tactics</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Preservation of Capital in the Stock Market</b></div><div dir="auto">127: On the idea of preserving capital during deflationary times, this is when cash "increases" in value [for the pedants out there, yes, cash doesn't <i>literally</i> increase in value, but if you think of all assets in relative terms, cash "increases" in value relative to assets that are deflating, and now you can buy such assets for less cash]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">128: The author recommends using stop loss orders for reducing your equity holdings in the late stages of a bull market: the stop loss should be set 1-3 points below the current price in accordance with its short-term uptrend line; note also the comments on emotional thinking here: on issues like what if the stock market has already entered a bear market, what if it is too late to sell, etc. <b>[NOTE: please see my commentary on the note for page 148, below, to address a little known risk of stop loss orders.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">129: "The top of a secondary reaction (up) in most bear markets offers the highest prices that will be seen for probably 1 to 5 years... So, the prices on this reaction will be the best you can hope for even though they may look pitifully low to you, since they had been so much higher six months before." <b>[This is very difficult to handle for even advanced investors, it's incredibly painful to sell when prices were so much higher so recently. I solve for this by thinking in multiyear or even decade long time horizons: if I can't see holding a stock for several years, and holding it through anything that comes, I shouldn't buy it in the first place, and further I probably need to have higher cash balances to offset any psychological stresses a bear market might impose on me.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>129: [It's fascinating to see the mentality of someone who just survived the 1970s era trifecta of high inflation, a terrible stock market <i>and</i> high interest rates, and compare to a modern investor who "knows" that the stock market "always goes up in the long run." The level of terror implicit in the former mentality is interesting and the lack of terror in the latter is likewise interesting!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">129ff: [Worth noting that this chapter has a lot of minutiae-based thoughts on "getting out when the getting is good" when you as a reader may simply not invest this way. For my part I think in terms of multi-year or even multi-decade holding periods for a lot of my investments, and I doubt I'm going to be successfully able to be cute and get out of the way of some correction, or a "second leg of" a correction, or whatever. One has to know oneself.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">138: The section here on traveling abroad and continuing to invest is kind of hilarious: back then of course the author had to make an expensive phone call to New York, or find a local broker to make that call and put in a transaction; today you just log on to your broker's website wherever you happen to be. Sometimes modernity isn't all that bad after all. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: The Tactics of Short Selling</b></div><div dir="auto">141ff : Any reader reading this chapter should carefully read Mohnish Pabrai's comments on short selling to balance out Schultz's view; Schultz author of course talks about some of the catastrophic risks of shorting: how you can buy a stock at 12 and it can only go to zero but a stock that you short at 12 can go to 50 or 400, etc. This is true and good advice, but then Schultz says "but in practice it doesn't, assuming you are in a bear market." (!!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">143: "Esau, in the bible, sold his inheritance short, one he did not own, to his brother for a meal of potage." Other intriguing examples of "short selling" in one form or another, like a lawyer selling his services "short" when accepting a retainer fee, or the post office essentially selling short when you buy a stamp. Interesting. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">144: "I believe short sales should always be protected with a stop loss order [the author suggests the 10% loss limit]... No nightmares, no big risks." <b>[Again, see my notes under page 148, below]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>145ff: On selecting good short candidates:</b></div><div dir="auto">1) The stock must have had a large rise in recent months, preferably an emotional one "not founded on factory reality."</div><div dir="auto">2) "The rise was on increased volume implying that many people will rush to protect their paper profits when the stock starts breaking down."</div><div dir="auto">3) "It must have stopped rising at least three weeks ago, preferably longer."</div><div dir="auto">4) It must show large volume at the top but is unable to rise higher, and most recently has started breaking down</div><div dir="auto">5) It has not declined more than 10% from its secondary peak</div><div dir="auto">6) Must have an abnormally high price earnings ratio</div><div dir="auto">7) Must have a low short interest </div><div dir="auto">8) Here he doesn't quite say it right, but he wants you to avoid stocks with thin floats or small market caps</div><div dir="auto">Then, from your list of stocks, choose those with the greatest downside volatility, in industries "on the downgrade" [whatever that means] and that have just created a bearish chart pattern like a double top or head and shoulders, are very popular and widely traded.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">147: On watching your short positions' relative strength: does it rally less on upswings compared to other stocks? Short or sell stocks that are weaker than the market gauged by relative strength.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">147ff: Note that the math of shorting is not as attractive as being long but typically sell-offs happen very quickly so your profitability measured in time can be much greater. "Fortunes can be amassed in days or even hours in a disintegrating market." Besides examples of panic phases of bear markets where the market can drop 15-25% in a matter of days, note that when the market index drops this much it means many stocks are dropping 40% or even 60%. [This is a good point, but often the panic phase happens so fast that you can never really catch it.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">147-8: Inverting the "never sell a dull market" expression during bull markets to "always sell a dull market" during a bear market. Again, interesting to think in inversions based on what kind of market backdrop you're in.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">148ff" "Rallies in bear markets are traditionally sharp." [Ah, so you can lose your fortune after all! <b>NOTE: It's also worth noting an important point here on stop loss orders, which is when a stock triggers your stop loss, it then becomes a market order. This doesn't always mean you will get filled at your stop-loss/buy-stop level! What technically happens is your stop-loss gets triggered and then your stop-loss order becomes a market order, done at whatever price the system gets for you. This is usually not a problem, and you typically will get filled at your stop loss price or close. However, </b><b>during really volatile, fast-market conditions</b><b> a stock may blast right through your stop-loss levels and then get sold (or bought if you're short and covering) at much worse prices. You might <i>think</i> you have protection because you have a stop loss in place but it doesn't mean you'll get filled at that level, not at all. The fact that the author doesn't discuss this nuance at all is disturbing. And that's not all, see note for page 173 below for yet <i>another</i> catastrophic risk of stop loss orders.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">150: On paying the dividend, the author says there's "no need for concern because the stock usually drops in price to allow for the dividend, so it has no real effect." Note also the free credit balance (from your short sale proceeds) which you can earn interest on, or potentially use to purchase other stocks if you have a margin account.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">151ff: A repeat here dealing with the objection that shorting is somehow unpatriotic, here referring to Napoleon making the unpatriotic claim himself. "But Gaudin [Napoleon's finance minister] explained to Napoleon that those who did so were 'expressing their judgment of future events,' and 'not their wish' for the country." Also addressing instances where short selling was ruled illegal [this actually happened during the 2008 GFC], usually the market crashes even more when this happens! It sounds counterintuitive but the short sellers actually provide buying power when no one else wants to buy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">152: On the ire people have for the successful bear.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">153: "And remember, solvent citizens are of more use to the nation than insolvent ones."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: The Essence of Making Money</b></div><div dir="auto">157: This quote made me laugh. "This section is probably the sweetest nectar in this volume, for it is an attempt to crystallize the key ingredients of making money in the market in a single, simple technique that is as near foolproof as any approach I know." [Unfortunately this chapter is rather disappointing: there's very little nectar here.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">159ff: The central idea here is to keep a (buy) stop loss order on your short position (and you have to adjust it daily!) that you let drift down as the stock declines, and so you will always be sure to lock in a profit. [Can't say I agree with this, just for the mental bandwidth reasons alone. His point here, though, is to never cover the short, just allow yourself to be stopped out if that's what happens.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">162: Rules/tactics here on short interest, if a stock has a short interest of 20% or more this is way too high to put on a short, low- to mid-single digits (which would be seen as a negligible short interest ratio) would be more appropriate; the author also goes over basically what is a "days to cover" ratio: the number of shares short divided by average daily volume. If it's something like five days to cover that's incredibly bullish and thus a terrible short; you want the short interest to be a fraction of daily or weekly volume.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">164: On the trap of being more interested in being right than making money/cutting losses. <b>[This is a critical insight, and the author should have gone much deeper into this concept! A lot of ludic/"good student"-type people struggle with the stock market in part because they struggle with all the opinion reversal that's required--the problem is the market is recursive and often makes you wrong even when you're right (for example, you were right on a thesis but the stock already went up more than enough to account for it, so you actually want to take the other side of the trade instead). Thus you <i>must</i> lose your attachment to wanting to be right, or as the author phrases it "you must have no pride of opinion"]</b> "You must have no pride of opinion... and not hesitate a second to admit you made a mistake and reverse your direction from forward to back or back to forward."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">164: A quick summary: select a high-volume stock with a sharp trendline, stick to one stock, stay in it until stopped out, place the new stop losses daily based on a trend line, trade short or long depending on the trend, if in doubt stay out, check the short interest, forget pride of opinion, buy in round lots.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Rules for Being a Flexible Investor and/or Trader</b></div><div dir="auto">167: <b>[It's amazing how much history rhymes: this quote where the author describes the stock market of his era sounds <i>exactly</i> like today's era] </b>"Because of monetary chaos, rampant inflation, deficit spending, and government intervention in markets and economies, one can no longer find stable markets nor use 1950s methods. Today we must be a good deal more flexible." <b>[On being pliable, alert, willing to get out of things quickly, and generally aiming at shorter-term time horizons and capturing shorter term profits. Again, however, note that we were just about to enter one of the greatest buy and hold investment environments ever <i>right after this book came out.</i>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">167ff: <b>[This chapter is full of horrible advice: like using margin, not investing long-term, that there's no good alternative to trading in and out of stocks. I get it, this is what you had to do to survive the 1970s, but there was about to be an extinction event for investors like this, and that's the real takeaway from this book.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">169ff: Here there's a superficial, actually dangerously superficial, discussion of hedging in commodity futures here; first of all you have to have a futures trading account (which is above the head of most investors), and the trade involves holding a longer-dated future, where you lay on a short position with a near month inside that longer-dated future for when the price goes against you.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>173: Finally! We have an admission of yet another risk of stop-loss orders where the specialist keeps your stop level in a book, and thus the book of stop orders itself <i>is what drives the price to trigger those stops</i>; thus by having you stop loss in place you expose yourself to a fragility of publicly showing (for the specialist and other market makers) precisely where you'll be forced to buy or sell! The author should have discussed this already, and you could write an entire chapter of a book about this problem.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">174: Discussion of straddles again here in the context of commodities or currencies. It's probably better to do this in the context of stock options around an existing underlying position. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>176: On how it's bad if you make money on your first stock--it only teaches hubris.</b> This is even more true for futures and options trading.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">178: Again the author is touching on stuff here that's simply too sophisticated for the rest of this book, but nevertheless, here is a good point for people tinkering in commodity markets where you will want to learn to hedge positions in the London market for a US commodity if and when necessary. Sometimes commodity futures trade limit up or limit down for several days and thus they never give you a chance to get out of a position: this can destroy you, so you want to have the ability to hedge out the position in another marketplace. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 15: How to Avoid Recessions' Biggest Waves</b></div><div dir="auto">179: "Every asset you have needs to be reevaluated in a bear market."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182: I have to confess the book is not holding much of my attention right now, it's kind of gone sideways. Frustrating for example to read a howler like this "prediction" where it's heads I win tails you lose: "a depression is highly possible, whether or not it is likely." This quote appears in a section talking about existential risks to the banking sector and concerns about a full-fledged 1929-caliber depression, things that absolutely did not even come close to happening in the decades after this book was published.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">184: Another sad prediction here: "A really bad one [bear market] seems due. I think it will be soon, but if it is not the next one, then it might well be the one after that." [One can't help but think of Yogi Berra here: "predictions are difficult, especially about the future."]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section VI: The Emotional Aspect</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 16: human psychology in the marketplace</b></div><div dir="auto">190: On how "our nature as optimists does us great damage in a bear market, which is our primary concern in this book."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">191: On the need to have extraordinary courage. <b>[This is actually an interesting paradox, something the author doesn't explore, but I can't seem to stop thinking about: somehow you have to temper your optimism, or even be deliberately pessimistic at times, but at the same time you have to have courage, which is a mental state that is similar to optimism on some level, the Venn diagrams overlap a little bit. This is worth some further thought I think: what kind of mental state do you really want to have to be a good investor in different kinds of market environments? Is it really courage, or is it really more like a carefully regulated fear?]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">192: Extremely useful quote here from Gustav Le Bon in his book <i>The Crowd</i> (although once again the author does not cite the book and I had to find the source myself) <i>"Whoever can supply the crowd with attractive emotional illusions may easily become their master, and whoever attempts to destroy such firmly entrenched illusions of the crowd is almost sure to be rejected."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195: On humility about our emotions: if you think you're objective you almost certainly are the opposite. This is just like epistemic humility: the people who think they have all the answers typically know very little, "those who know a great deal feel they know hardly anything." Dunning-Kruger, basically.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 17: The Crowd Is Usually Wrong</b></div><div dir="auto">201: On the need to think in a contrary way, having a skeptical attitude, avoiding the crowd but not assuming the majority is wrong <i>all</i> the time. "They are likely only to be wrong when there appears to be no division of opinion. The logic of this is that life is an ever-changing thing; and opinion that begins by being quite sound dates itself like everything else so that, by the time everybody has come around to holding it, it should already be history, and a set of circumstances that originally caused it have changed." [Again, the central idea here is the fundamental recursiveness of markets. You have to know what people generally think so you can position yourself relative to that consensus.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">201: The author goes through an example of how a group of insiders take action on a stock and then others follow, and then soon enough everybody sees what's going on, and thus it's imputed into the stock price. <b>"The art of applying contrary opinion to the market, therefore, is to gauge at what point the technical and fundamental reasons are so obvious that they can be seen by anybody. For that is the point in which the experts take their profits, and so should you. Although this theory is known as thinking contra, this is not strictly true. What one aims at is rather to think before the crowd, and this is usually synonymous with thinking contra."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">206: "And contrary thinking is part of thinking, for it gives freedom to thought and loosens it from the chains of simple acceptance."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Section VII: Economics, Predictions, and Conclusions</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 18: The Economic Picture in the '80s</b></div><div dir="auto">[This is a terrible chapter sharing the author's economic and tax policy ideas, it has nothing to do with the book.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">212: Interesting blurb here about Calvin Coolidge in 1924 saying "not over 25%" was the optimum tax rate to maximize collections. [Heh, I guess the Laffer Curve was around a lot earlier than Art Laffer ever was.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">213ff: Rehash of the 20s and 30s leading up to and into the Depression, complaints about taxes, socialism, regulation, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 19: Predictions</b></div><div dir="auto">226: Note that this is a weird, borderline unreadable chapter that contains no predictions at all. <b>However, there <i>is</i> one insight: don't make predictions!</b> At least do not make them in front of others, so you end up defending them [or defending them egoically, as the author means here: having an emotional or reputational attachment to being "right" in your prediction]. <b>The idea here is to set conditions (egoic or otherwise) to stay flexible, don't be stubborn, and reposition yourself as needed.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 20: Conclusions</b></div><div dir="auto">228: "...the word "stagflation " was coined (by me)." ??[For what it's worth, Google doesn't agree, citing British politician Iain Macleod as the coiner]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Robert Rhea: <i>The Dow Theory</i></div><div dir="auto">Humphrey Neill: <i>The Art of Contrary Thinking</i><br /></div><div dir="auto">Humphrey Neill: <i>Tape Reading and Market Tactics</i></div><div dir="auto">Humphrey Neill: <i>The Ruminator</i></div><div dir="auto">William Peter Hamilton: <i>The Stock Market Barometer</i></div><div dir="auto">Jim Sibbet: <i>How to Profit Three Times from Inflation</i> (lecture)</div><div dir="auto">H.M. Gartley: <i>Profits in the Stock Market</i> (per the author, "H. M. Gartley was a great technician in the 1930s. He did more work on volume than any other man.")</div><div dir="auto">Richard Russell: <i>Dow Theory Today</i></div><div dir="auto">Robert D. Edwards and John Magee: <i>Technical Analysis of Stock Trends</i></div><div dir="auto">J. Edward Meeker: <i>The Work Of The Stock Exchange</i></div><div dir="auto">Edward E. Hooker: <i>You Can't Win in Wall Street</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Finally, the author chose quite a beautiful dedication quote for this book. Investors would understand perfectly.</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrnGJg-RAQ5rEj_hORs8JofyMDChSSHmclgnjrRKP3MmSlD22mReebs_KN-NfaWSfqS6Lsc8mhnuHrk663rFmYitbDmEycz5NHCdYcyr4iYo7Xf-rWVUbGLQeZO5Is85YK4t5NA7mfYIXr89XLpIc_Na45K_i8HTntTMnMQnO7OC1wB95_o-aEq0vb0G1v/s2884/IMG_20240101_070949684.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2243" data-original-width="2884" height="498" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrnGJg-RAQ5rEj_hORs8JofyMDChSSHmclgnjrRKP3MmSlD22mReebs_KN-NfaWSfqS6Lsc8mhnuHrk663rFmYitbDmEycz5NHCdYcyr4iYo7Xf-rWVUbGLQeZO5Is85YK4t5NA7mfYIXr89XLpIc_Na45K_i8HTntTMnMQnO7OC1wB95_o-aEq0vb0G1v/w640-h498/IMG_20240101_070949684.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-60301233059215268752024-02-06T16:15:00.000-08:002024-02-11T18:28:38.939-08:00The Great Taking by David Rogers Webb<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div><i>"What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history."</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes a book hits you with a central idea that seems at first so preposterously unlikely that you can't help but laugh out loud (as I did) and think, "this is all conspiracy theory." </div><div><br /></div><div>But if there's anything the past three or four years have taught us, <i>it's to perk up and pay attention when you hear a conspiracy theory.</i> Lately they sure have a knack for coming true.<b>[*]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">There's another thing that happens when you read a book like this: your brain does whatever it can to make The Taking <i>not be true</i>. It spins up all kinds of defense mechanisms to limit the mental discomfort of these disturbing ideas. In fact, I was so struck by the spinning pushback of my <i>own</i> brain that I <a href="https://youtu.be/Z8egc3vMN10?si=SWr5MypD7opKVuE9" target="_blank">did a video on my Youtube channel on this very topic</a>.</div><div dir="auto"> </div><div>Which takes us to the central notion of what this book offers: it gets you to think, for the first time, about the plumbing underneath the financial system--and how it might be used against you. </div><div><br /></div><div>When we think about our investments--mutual funds, stocks, bond funds, or whatever else we own--we rarely think about the legal and custodial infrastructure behind everything. We just go to our brokerage firm's website or app and click buy or sell. Nobody thinks about what's behind the curtain: who clears trades, who verifies them, who holds database or recordkeeping privileges over everything, who umpires any confusion or conflict over ownership, and so on. <i>We simply don't think about the various custodians running all the plumbing.</i> </div><div><br /></div><div>Ironically, it's just like real plumbing: the only time we think about it is when it doesn't work. And then it's too late--you've got turds all over your bathroom floor. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Bitcoiners teach us "not your keys, not your coins," driving home the point that if your Bitcoin is custodied with someone else <i>you do not own your Bitcoin</i>. However, in the tradfi markets <i>everything</i> is custodied by somebody else and we as investors have little choice but to go along with it. We don't know how that system is run, who's running it, what its fragilities or flaws might be, what might go wrong, or how the system could be used to rug everybody and to seize property. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Thus this author has generously offered a book that gets you thinking about sovereignty, control and custody in all possible senses of the words. If you really think about it, most ownership of most things comes only via intermediaries! We place a lot of trust in these entities--whether we're aware of it or not. Maybe we shouldn't. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><div><b>Finally, if you'd like to learn more about this book and the ideas behind it, here are a few resources: </b></div><div>1) A <a href="https://thegreattaking.com/" target="_blank">free PDF/public domain copy of <i>The Great Taking</i></a></div><div>2) <a href="https://youtu.be/QZcVYmEJ9x4?si=AVS67_Y1I24Ks0c0" target="_blank">An extended interview with author David Rogers Webb by Daniela Cambone</a>, about the book itself as well as the author's background. <i>[Note this interview is at times frustrating: the author (as earnest and genuine as he is) tends to ramble, often struggling to stay on topic]</i></div><div>3) A <a href="https://youtu.be/kaBrgNrB_7s?si=2i4xtRvkyWvatrnN" target="_blank">discussion of <i>The Great Taking</i></a> on my Youtube channel, covering issues of self-sovereignty and whether this book is something to really be alarmed about, followed by <a href="https://youtu.be/Z8egc3vMN10?si=WvYEpMom8ag-QkjY" target="_blank">a meta-discussion about epistemic discomfort with books like <i>The Great Taking</i></a>.</div><div> </div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Footnote: </b></div><div><div dir="auto"><b>[*]</b> By the way, this takes us to another life heuristic for the current era: <i>get yourself a conspiracy theory friend!</i> It's the only way to know what's going to happen. I wish I were kidding. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div><i><b>[Readers familiar with this blog know what's coming: a warning! Don't read any further. </b>What follows is a long (and I mean hilariously long) series of notes, quotes and thoughts on the text. They are to help me order and remember my thinking, they're not really for you! I mean, feel free to read them if you want (or maybe skim the bolded parts), but seriously, you ought to value your life more. <b>You have better things to do: self-sovereignty to develop, weights to lift, sats to stack, cigars to smoke, </b><a href="http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/2009/10/25-best-laughably-cheap-recipes-at.html" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">laughably cheap meals to cook</a><b>, </b><a href="http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-reprise-of-your-money-or-your-life.html" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">finances to conquer</a><b>, friends to spend time with, books to read, etc.] </b></i></div><div><br /></div><div>*****************************************</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Notes:</b></div><div><b>Prologue:</b></div><div>vii: "Presently, as we well know, families are divided. People are experiencing a kind of isolation, perhaps not physically, but in spirit and mind. This has been made to happen through the dark magic of false news and narrative. This alone has been a great crime against humanity. The tactical purposes are many: to confuse and divide; to cause disengagement; to demoralize; to instill fears and to introduce false focal points for these fears; to manipulate the historical narrative; to create a false sense of the present reality; and ultimately, to cause people to acquiesce to what has been planned." <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>ix: Comments here on his family's history in Cleveland as the US de-industrialized: his family wasn't prepared for it: "it seems they did not get the memo about what was coming." The family business, a medium-sized machine/fabricating shop at its peak, collapses by the early 70s.</div><div><br /></div><div>x: This author got his awakening to the Fed/fiat system at a very young age: 12! His father was 12 when the 1933 Bank Holiday and gold seizure happened during the Great Depression.</div><div><br /></div><div>xi: Thumbnail sketch here of the secret meetings leading to the creation of the USA's Federal Reserve Bank <b>[Note: for those who want to learn more about this subject, <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-creature-from-jekyll-island-second.html" target="_blank">Ed Griffin's <i>The Creature From Jekyll Island</i> is <i>mandatory</i> reading</a>]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xivff: Background on the author: he parlays a job in computer systems into a job on an M&A team, barely avoids taking a job with Ivan Boesky's firm; also luckily doesn't take a job with Rothschild right before it collapsed after the '87 crash; then takes a job with a $1.3 billion PE firm for half what he was making doing M&A. Commutes and hour and a half each way from Chatham, NJ, to the Manhattan, etc. The PE firm had all attorney partners and none of them knew financial analysis. (!) [The deal he's talking about here was to acquire LCI Communications, thus it looks like he was likely working for Warburg Pincus]</div><div><br /></div><div>xvii: He quits, can't abide by the ridiculous hours and time away from his family. They move back to Cleveland Heights, OH. He started a fund with partners, grows it to $2B in assets over nine years, he runs the trading and trading strategies. Then LTCM happens: "Through direct handling of all trading, I could see that something significant had changed in the internals of the market. It was plain to me that this was not just an atmosphere of crisis but the beginning of a real crisis." He gets kicked out of the firm while on vacation, but then the employees stage a revolt and demand he get full control of the hedge fund. </div><div><br /></div><div>xviii: "By the late 1990's, I had understood that money creation by central banks was dwarfing real economic activity, and that the actions of the Federal Reserve were determining the direction of financial markets. This was considered to be conspiracy theory at the time, even by my partners. I developed a way to anticipate changes in the direction of the financial markets based on changes in the rate of growth of the money supply. This was being driven by open market operations of the New York Fed. <b>[Basically you might say here that he learns "don't fight the Fed"]</b> </div><div><br /></div><div>xvix: On his "cream of the crap" investing strategy: "I developed a way of using hundreds of carefully selected positions on the short side, dubbed 'the cream of the crap.' Using this system, no one position could hurt us badly, and, if I did it right, it would work much better than an index." [This time period sounds like around 1999-2000-ish.] </div><div><br /></div><div><b>xix: [Interesting insights on thinking about thinking in this paragraph]:</b> "The intuitive mind, when adequately and correctly informed, can be miraculously powerful, knowing immediately what the rational mind cannot yet see. On the other hand, if it is given bad information, and if incorrect assumptions are not surfaced and challenged, it is a dysfunctional disaster. The rational mind can be employed to inform the intuitive with vetted information, and to continuously test what the intuitive mind thinks it knows. With cooperation between these aspects of the mind, one can drill down to examine detail, zoom out to see bigger implications, and vice versa."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>xx: [Another good insight here about learning domain specific terminology by talking to people and eventually getting to the substantive questions/issues after you know your way around their "language"]:</b> "I had found through my due diligence work that it was possible to become conversant within a surprisingly short period of time even in technical issues with leaders in a field. It was done by doing it. After the first conversation, I was better equipped for the second. With each conversation, I was able to better hone in on the substantive questions. By the third conversation, the other person actually became interested in speaking with me, because I had just spoken with two people in their field about some interesting issues. And it built from there. I could do this with physicians, chemical engineers, and even neuroscientists. They sometimes asked if I had trained in their field."</div><div><br /></div><div>xxi: "My mother asked what courses I had taken or books I had read to teach me to do what I was doing. I responded, 'Mom, there are no books explaining this.'" [Holy cow is he ever right about that.]<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>xxiiff: He has a meeting with Soros, they are talking about the odds of a coming crash due to extreme excess capital spending in the USA. Soros hears out Webb's thinking: "'This is very good!' He did not disagree with me about the bust, but said '<i>They</i> cannot allow the equity culture to fail.' I said, 'What can they do that they haven't already done.' He said in answer, 'You don't know what they can do.' So, in such a moment, even George Soros spoke of a <i>they</i>." <b>[The irony here is this is YEARS before the GFC: the author doesn't say exactly but he mentions meeting Soros again in early 2003, so this "crash call" was so early as to be disastrous.] </b>"The next couple years nearly killed me."</div><div><br /></div><div>xxiiiff: <b>[On the equities markets as a sort of closed system, if you don't consider the Fed]:</b> "The markets had always functioned largely as a closed system (excepting the open market operations of the New York Fed, which I had learned to monitor and interpret). I could see flows from one sector of the market to another. In order for some areas of the financial markets to rise significantly, other sectors were being sold to provide the funds. I looked for opportunities to work opposite to these flows and rotations, buying what others had orders to sell, and selling what others wanted to buy, but drawing them through the bid/asked spread." Webb then starts seeing the market levitate without countervailing "flows": all sectors, stocks and bonds, start going higher. He concludes that created money was being injected into the financial markets. "It is not understood even now that this was the actual beginning of 'Quantitative Easing' (QE), more than five years before it was officially announced during the Global Financial Crisis. I saw it as an act of desperation, and again felt my responsibility to protect people."</div><div><br /></div><div>xxiv: He sees all sorts of crash indicators [but, again, WAY too early: early 2004]; he discovers the government makes methodology changes in counting foreclosures, which masks reality; cites lots of other government disinformation about the economy: "I was shaken. Why would our own government work to give the public a false understanding of what was happening?" </div><div><br /></div><div>xxv: On money creation and debt expansion driving spending and GDP.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>xxvff: "What is the job of the Fed Chairman? In the case of The Maestro it seems to have been to obfuscate what was really happening. Why would he do that? Answer: The Fed chairman does not work for the public; he works for the people who own and control the Fed. You are not allowed to know who these people are. Why would the people who control the Fed wish to obfuscate what was happening? Now we are getting somewhere. There is something much, much bigger behind this. That's what this book is about."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xxvi: Discussion of the lax lending standards of the pre-GFC era; various securitized assets created, CDOs, etc. <b>[Note also this quote: "CDOs alone had reached the size of global GDP" is misleading, perhaps the <i>notional value</i> of these CDOs could be that big, possibly, but even that is misleading: that's like describing the aggregate market value of put options in terms of the aggregate underlying equity value contracted by those options: in reality the options' market value is a tiny fraction of the latter's notional value.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xxvii: "With a significant short side in the rising market, we were losing money, but I felt it was my responsibility to continue." [Again, this is really, really early to start shorting the market if it's still around 2004; it's a way to quickly destroy your LPs!]</div><div><br /></div><div>xxvii: On the importance of prime brokers, and how if you're short you are very VERY exposed to your prime. <b>[It's worth recalling Marc Cohodes here, who famously got fucked over by Goldman Sachs as the firm unilaterally altered their custodial agreements without advance notice, which resulted in putting Cohodes and his fund out of business in the teeth of the GFC.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xxvii: He tries to explain his concerns to everyone around him about things like rising debt levels, the hollowing out of the industrial base of the USA, the leverage in the system due to CDOs and securitized mortgages, but he can't get anybody to listen or even understand him [!!! holy cow this must be a lonely, lonely feeling...] "I needed to understand how to get through to people." He actually goes <i>door to door</i> to talk to civilians about this stuff.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>xxviii: He votes for Obama but is appalled: "But there was no change coming with 'Change you Can Believe in' Obama, whose cabinet oddly came to conform to the candidate list of Citigroup. After that, I stopped voting." <b>[Brother, I know the feeling.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xviii: In 2008, <b>I noticed the failure of a small broker dealer in Florida</b> [really curious: which broker dealer might he mean here??] <b>and I was shocked to learn that client assets owned outright with no borrowing against them were swept to the receiver and encumbered in the bankruptcy estate. I had to understand how this could possibly have happened, and eventually uncovered that ownership right to securities, which had been personal property for four centuries, had somehow been subverted.</b> This would be born out further in the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and MF Global." [My understanding is that this isn't correct: assets at broker dealers are segregated, and this should not happen; further, I don't think it did happen with Lehman.] </div><div><br /></div><div>xxix: He moves to Sweden [!] In April of 2011. "I was asked to speak at an investment conference in Stockholm. The title of my presentation was 'Paradigm Collapse.' It was the first time I spoke publicly about the gutting of investor protections, including ownership rights to securities, and of the context for understanding why this was happening."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>xxx: "I have not wanted to write this book, or have anything to do with this, but i[t] has become <i>unavoidable</i>. It is like exorcising a demon, which has plagued me and my family. It must be done. And then, I will be done. I am self-publishing this because I don't want to involve a lot of people. I just need to get it out. I expect that there will be efforts to criticize me personally and this work."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>xxxff: "It is important to note that what is exposed here is not conjecture. It is found in authentic primary source documents, in which the planners themselves lay out their plans. I wish to acknowledge the important contribution of my extraordinary friend, who found key documentation of the Legal Certainty Group in one of his many sleepless nights. I thank the miraculous people who have helped me and kept me alive... You are about to be confronted with <i>quite</i> shocking, depressing material. You don't want to know about this. I don't even want to know about it."</div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>I: Introduction</b></div><div>1: "What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>1: "We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity." Those behind this, per the author include invisible central bankers, those who control the money printing [or are "near" the money printer--basically cantillon insiders, although he doesn't use this term]. </div><div><br /></div><div>2: "The people you are allowed to see are hired 'face men' and 'face women.' They are expendable." This has been attempted before: see for example the Great Wars period, the Depression between them; but there are now many more tools by which to perform an operation like this.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>2: See also the narrative that will be used: we all lived beyond our means, it is our fault, and the financial system now has to be "restarted": Et voila! Here is your central bank digital currency! </b>"Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives"</div><div><br /></div><div>2-3: On money velocity: V = GDP/Money Supply; see Milton Friedman writing about the collapse in money velocity from 1880 to WWI; <b>within a few years the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires as well as the Qing Dynasty all failed, note also the slow collapse of the British Empire over this time. </b></div><div><br /></div><div>3: "While there was widespread deprivation [during this period], selected banking interests took the collateral of the thousands of banks which were forced to close, as well as of a great many people and businesses large and small--the indebted. In the U.S., gold held by the public was confiscated. But most importantly, closely held secretive private control of central banks and money creation was maintained, as was the aforementioned control over society's key institutions, including political parties, governments, intelligence agencies, armed forces, police, major corporations, and media.</div> "The heirs to this control position have known for many decades that such a collapse in VOM would come again. They have been preparing. For them, it is an absolute imperative to remain in control through the collapse and 'Great Reset'; otherwise they risk being discovered, investigated and prosecuted. They are not doing it for us. There is no noble purpose."</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">4: <b>"If something does not make sense, it is necessary to change one's perspective and aim for a larger understanding.</b> Crises do not occur by accident; they are induced intentionally and used to consolidate power and to put in place provisions for measures that will be used later."</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">4-5: "Profound decline in VOM [led] to the Financial Panic of 1907, which was used to justify the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in the quiet days before Christmas, 1913. Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated six months later."</div><div dir="ltr"><br /><div>See the VOM chart from page 5:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjV1rwvwlcWr962K6GO8k7jVFpwyuGNa348m12Se81T4Bhi0Ersbh-TD7ruzvUTS3LVksQe0y2t3I_YzcUAF3RiwS0CazGDNpmrwp8NboNS1d2VOgla7q6hEBPtm-m6lgpq8TTwUDZElhHHui535xUGl11OmV0jzBGkHjBxigpgx-QD2iOML8hW5DjW_2i/s652/Screenshot%202023-12-28%2010.55.25%20AM%20(1).png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="652" height="476" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjV1rwvwlcWr962K6GO8k7jVFpwyuGNa348m12Se81T4Bhi0Ersbh-TD7ruzvUTS3LVksQe0y2t3I_YzcUAF3RiwS0CazGDNpmrwp8NboNS1d2VOgla7q6hEBPtm-m6lgpq8TTwUDZElhHHui535xUGl11OmV0jzBGkHjBxigpgx-QD2iOML8hW5DjW_2i/w640-h476/Screenshot%202023-12-28%2010.55.25%20AM%20(1).png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div>5: "And so, perhaps the announcement of the 'Great Reset' has been motivated not by 'Global Warming' or by profound insights into a 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', but rather by certain knowledge of the collapse of this fundamental monetary phenomenon, the implications of which extend far beyond economics."</div></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><b>5: "Something has been planned for us, but not for the reasons you have been given. How might we come to know something about the intentions of the planners? Perhaps, by examining their preparations?"</b><br /><div><br /></div><div><b>II: Dematerialization</b></div><div>6: "There are now no property rights to securities held in book-entry form in any jurisdiction, globally. In the grand scheme to confiscate all collateral, dematerialization of securities was the essential first step." </div><div><br /></div><div>6-7: See the CIA's Bill Dentzer, Jr.'s own memoirs; the CIA was given this dematerialization as a mission; Dentzer went on to run New York State's banking regulatory body, he was appointed by then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, then put in charge of DTC, Depository Trust Corp, and stayed there for 22 years to see dematerialization through. Transition to "book entry" and the elimination of physical stock certificates.</div><div><br /></div><div>7: "DTC eventually became the model for the Central Securities Depository (CSD) and Central Clearing Counterparty (CCP), the purposes of which will be explained later."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>III: Security Entitlement</b></div><div>8: "Since their beginnings more than four centuries ago, tradable financial instruments were recognized under law everywhere as personal property (perhaps that is why they were called 'securities'). It may come as a shock to you that this is no longer the case."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>8: The author gives us an analogy:</b> "Let's say that you have purchased an automobile for cash. Having no debt against the vehicle, you believe that you now own it outright. Despite that, the auto dealer has been allowed by a newly invented legal concept to treat your car as his asset, and to use it as collateral to borrow money for his own purposes. Now the auto dealer has become bankrupt, and your vehicle along with all of the others sold by the dealer are seized by certain secured creditors of the dealership, with no judicial review being necessary, as legal certainty was previously established that they have absolute power to take your car in the event of the bankruptcy of the dealer."</div><div><br /></div><div>8-9: "Now, to be clear, I am not talking about your car! I am illustrating the horror and simplicity of the lie: <b>You are led to believe that you own something, but someone else secretly controls it as collateral.</b> And they have now established legal certainty that they have absolute power to take it immediately in the event of insolvency, and not your insolvency, but insolvency of the people who secretly gave them your property as collateral. It does not seem possible. But this is exactly what has been done with all tradable financial instruments, globally! The proof of this is absolutely irrefutable. This is wired to go now."</div><div><br /></div><div>9: "Essentially all securities 'owned' by the public in custodial accounts, pension plans and investment funds are now encumbered as collateral underpinning the derivatives complex, which is so large--an order of magnitude greater than the entire global economy--that there is not enough of anything in the world to back it."<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>9: "...in the implosion of 'The Everything Bubble', collateral will be swept up on a vast scale. The plumbing to do this is in place. Legal certainty has been established that the collateral can be taken immediately and without judicial review, by entities described in court documents as 'the protected class.' <b>Even sophisticated professional investors, who were assured that their securities are 'segregated', will not be protected."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>9-10: These are the key facts:<br />* Ownership of securities as property has been replaced with a new legal concept of a "security entitlement", which is a contractual claim assuring a very weak position if the account provider becomes insolvent.<br />* All securities are held in un-segregated pooled form. Securities used as collateral, and those restricted from such use, are held in the same pool.<br />* All account holders, including those who have prohibited use of their securities as collateral, must, by law, receive only a pro-rata share of residual assets.<br /></div><div>* 'Re-vindication,' i.e. the taking back of one's own securities in the event of insolvency, is absolutely prohibited.<br />* Account providers may legally borrow pooled securities to collateralize proprietary trading and financing.<br />* 'Safe Harbor' assures secured creditors priority claim to pooled securities ahead of account holders.<br />* The absolute priority claim of secured creditors to pooled client securities has been upheld by the courts.<br /><br /></div><div>10: Account providers are legally empowered to 'borrow' pooled securities, without restriction. This is called 'self help.' As we will see, the objective is to utilize all securities as collateral."<br /><br /></div><div>10ff: "I assure you that this is not conjecture. You would be greatly mistaken in dismissing this as 'conspiracy theory', which is a common reaction to so much unpleasantness. It is possible to really know about this. The documentation is absolutely irrefutable." [Here he follows with an extended excerpt from a transcript between the EU's Clearing and Settlement Legal Certainty Group and the NY Fed, ending with "under Article 8, the entitlement holder has only a pro rata share in the securities intermediary's interest in the financial asset in question."</div><div><br /></div><div>12: A lot of these disturbing rules and regulations appear to come out of the EU.</div><div><br /></div><div>13: "In the next global financial panic, what are the chances that there will be much of anything remaining in these pools of securities after the secured creditors have helped themselves?... The reason given for this legislation on legal certainty is 'demand for collateral' by 'market participants.' They are not referring to you and me, the public. 'Market participants' is a euphemism for the powerful creditors who control governments."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>IV: Harmonization</b></div><div>14: "The 'Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Certain Rights in Respect of Securities Held with an Intermediary' [7] was drafted in 2002 and signed in 2006. It is an international multilateral treaty intended to remove, globally, legal uncertainties for cross-border securities transactions."</div><div><br /></div><div>16: "Harmonization of this regime giving control globally to a select group of secured creditors was pushed from the highest level of the U.S. government."</div><div><br /></div><div>18: "It took ten years of conniving, but in 2014 the way forward was made certain with the Central Securities Depository Regulation (CSDR)."</div><div><br /></div><div>18ff: "A Central Security Depository (CSD) operates a book entry system for electronic settlement of trades and maintains a record of 'ownership.' An International Central Security Depository (ICSD) is linked to national CSDs, and it handles securities lending and collateral management... And thus, the desired goal of cross-border mobility of collateral has been achieved. How was that engineered?</div> "CSDR provides for links between CSDs. National CSDs, which hold the record of ownership, are linked to the International Central Security Depositories; the transfer of legal title to customer collateral from the national CSD to the ICSD, and the use of customer collateral are thus enabled. The customer has 'ownership' in the book-entry system of the national CSD, while the collateral is held in pooled form at the ICSD level. This allows the 'cross-border services', i.e. the use of customer collateral. This is essentially the U.S. model, in which all custodians have accounts at DTC, which holds all securities in pooled form. DTC functions as an ICSD."</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div><b>19: Examples from Finland and Sweden: "Once upon a time, Finland and Sweden had legal systems and national registries of securities ownership, which assured owners that their securities could not be used as collateral without express agreement. It had been possible to own and hold Swedish government bonds, for example, with absolute certainty that they could not be lost in an insolvency of a custodian. In 2006, the Legal Certainty group identified Sweden and Finland as having problematic law.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>19: "In 2008, Euroclear was allowed to acquire one hundred percent of Nordic Central Security Depository (NCSD), which owned the central security depositories of both Finland and Sweden, Suomen Arvopaperikeskus Oy (APK) and VPC AB (VPC), respectively. These are now local CSDs linked to Euroclear Bank SA/NV which operates as an ICSD under Belgian law."<br /></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">19-20: Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) makes such a disclosure with respect to central securities depositories in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Euroclear Bank SA/NV and Clearstream Banking S.A. [15]. Here are the shocking key passages from that disclosure:<br /><i> "In the unlikely event of a shortfall of securities the client in question will not be able to claim a right of separation but will likely be considered as an unsecured creditor without priority to the assets of the bankruptcy estate."</i><br /><div> <b>"Thus, over a period of six years, property rights to securities in Sweden and Finland were deliberately subverted. These countries went from having the strongest property rights to securities to having no property rights to securities beyond an artificial appearance of ownership."</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>20-21: "In 2014, coincident with the EU directive on central securities depositories, shocking changes were made to Swedish law. Very few know about this, other than the people who did it."</b> The author then goes through the legalese on prevailing law on these custodied accounts here: </div><div>"The first paragraph states that, 'The intended disposal must be specified carefully.' That seems like a good thing, but it goes on to state the following:</div><i> 'The first paragraph does not apply if the company's counterparty or the parties to an agreement in which the company participates is another company that is under the supervision of the Financial Supervisory Authority or a foreign company within the EEA that is allowed to run comparable activities in its home country and that is under the reassuring supervision of an authority or other competent body.'</i><br />"This gives the local CSD legal authority, and broad latitude to pass legal control of customer assets as collateral to the ICSD without the knowledge or approval of the account holder. The implementation of this is now so thorough that a Swedish citizen cannot hold Swedish government bonds in Sweden as property without exposure to insolvency of the account provider, the local CSD, or of the ICSD. <b>The securities of Swedish citizens are certainly pooled with securities being used as collateral elsewhere."</b> </div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><b>21: "I came to Sweden in 2009 in order to be able to hold Swedish government bonds in Sweden with property rights. I was able to do that using a VP konto (account) at Handelsbanken. However, following the legal changes made in 2014, Handelsbanken completely discontinued the VP konto structure, and offered clients only custody accounts."</b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">22: The author met with senior government officials to warn them: "In 2011, a friend who had been a State Secretary in the Swedish government arranged for me to meet with the Minister and the State Secretary for Financial Markets. I was so moved when I received the email informing me of this, tears came to my eyes; it gave me hope that in Sweden it might be possible to make a difference, and thus to turn the tide somewhere. <b>I am forever grateful to them for that meeting; such a thing would never be allowed in the land of my birth.</b> <b><i>[Quite striking to read this. He's right, the USA has a gigantic and impenetrable bureaucratic-administrative system that a normal citizen cannot hope to penetrate it or get help from it, much less be able fight it off in some sort of adversarial proceeding. Part of the problem is nation-states do not scale well. You maybe can get access to your national leadership in a country of 10m like Sweden, but in a country to 300+m? Forget it.]</i></b> They heard me out about the implications of conforming to the U.S. model, and did not disagree. They said it might be possible to avoid this if the Germans would stand against it, the implication being that little Sweden could not do it alone." <b><i>[Yes, he got a hearing from leaders but they couldn't (or wouldn't) do anything anyway.]</i></b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div><b>V: Collateral Management</b></div><div><i><b>23: "People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance."</b></i></div><b>--Niccolo Machiavelli</b><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">23: Note the instant cross-border mobility of capital in the modern era; the sheer amount of derivatives and financial contracts that can be used to take real things as collateral; thus there is the means to take securities (<i>all</i> securities, per this author) as collateral; <b>this will be done using the "rails" of collateral management systems, which are also in place cross-border; this was done by regulatory contrivance.</b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">24: "This was designed and deliberately executed to move control of collateral to the largest secured creditors behind the derivatives complex. This is the subterfuge, the endgame of it all."<br /><div><br /></div><div>26: "Collateral transformation is simply the encumbrance of any and all types of client assets under swap contracts, which end up in the derivatives complex. This is done without the knowledge of the clients, who were led to believe that they safely owned these securities, and serves no beneficial purpose whatsoever for these clients... And so as we have seen here irrefutably, <b>the objective is to utilize all securities as collateral and hence to have the real practical means to take all securities as collateral."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>27-8: "Inevitably following the 'Everything Bubble' will be the 'Everything Crash.' Once prices of essentially everything crash and all financial firms rapidly become insolvent, these collateral management systems will automatically sweep all collateral to the Central Clearing Counterparties (CCPs) and Central Banks. The trap, into which all nations have been herded, is ready and waiting to be sprung."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>VI: Safe Harbor for Whom, and from What?</b></div><div>29: On significant changes to "safe harbor" provisions in the US bankruptcy code that were put in place in 2005. "This was about 'safe harbor' for secured creditors against claims of customers to their own assets."</div><div><br /></div><div>30: The author claims that the new changes removes claw-backable transfers that would have been viewed as fraudulent in the prior safe harbor language. </div><div><br /></div><div>30ff: See also Stephen J. Lubbin's book <i>The Bankruptcy Code Without Safe Harbors</i> which comments on the 2005 changes: </div><div>1) "A protected contract... is only protected if the holder is also a protected person, as defined in the Bankruptcy Code. Financial participants--essentially very large financial institutions--are always protected."</div><div>2) "The safe harbors as currently enacted were promoted by the derivatives industry as necessary measures... The systemic risk argument for the safe harbors is based on the belief that the inability to close out a derivative position because of the automatic stay would cause a daisy chain of failure amongst</div>financial institutions."<div>3) "The problem with this argument is that it fails to consider the risks created by the rush to close out positions and demand collateral from distressed firms. Not only does this contribute to the failure of an already weakened financial firm, by fostering a run on the firm, but it also has consequent effects on the markets generally. ...the Code will have to guard against attempts to grab massive amounts of collateral on the eve of a bankruptcy, in a way that is unrelated to the underlying value of the trades being collateralized."</div><div><br /></div><div>31ff: Now back to the author: <b>"The new safe harbor regime was cemented into case law with the court proceedings around the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. In the lead-up to the failure, JP Morgan (JPM) had taken client assets as a secured creditor while being the custodian for these client assets!</b> Under long-standing bankruptcy law this would clearly have been a constructively fraudulent preference transfer benefitting an insider. And so, JPM was sued by clients whose assets were taken." <b>JPM's legal team made their argument based on the new safe harbor language, and the court agreed with them:</b> "JPMC, as one of the leading financial institutions in the world, quite obviously is a member of the protected class and qualifies as both a 'financial institution' and a 'financial participant.'</div><div><br /></div><div>32: "And so, only 'a member of the protected class' is empowered to take customer assets in this way. Smaller secured creditors are not similarly privileged." <b>[It is interesting to put this together with what was said during Fed/Congressional hearings after the collapse of Silvergate Bank and Silicon Valley Bank in 2023: the Fed/FDIC was willing to insure/backstop deposits at the largest banks (the SIFI banks) but was unwilling to do so for non-SIFI banks). This gives another clue to which entities are "protected"... and it also indicates that there's really no reason even for the <i>existence</i> of small/non-SIFI banks.]</b></div></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">32: "The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was used to establish case law precedent that the 'protected class' of secured creditors have an absolute priority claim to client assets, and that, potentially and practically, only they will end up with the assets."</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div><b>VII: Central Clearing Parties</b></div><div>33: "Central Clearing Parties (CCPs) take on counterparty risk between parties to a transaction and provide clearing and settlement for trades in foreign exchange, securities, options, and most importantly derivative contracts. <b>If a participant fails, the CCP assumes the obligations of the failed clearing participant."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>34: See Euroclear's statement: "But, for the EU-institutions, the redline [sic] is that if a CCP fails, then the taxpayer will not be expected to pay." The author argues that this "is a subterfuge assuring that in the 'resolution' the secured creditors will immediately take the underlying assets; that is the plan, i.e., nationalization must not be allowed."</div><div><br /></div><div>35ff: Note that DTCC, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, operates two CCPs; <b>DTCC has a market capitalization of only $3.5B, yet it underpins the entire US securities market and derivative complex, yet "CCPs must be sufficiently capitalized in order to withstand losses from both member default and non-member default loss events."</b> Per the author: <b>"This is one of the many open deceptions, which are unpleasant and inconvenient to see, and so, readily dismissed."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>37: Again, recall the transcript between EU regulators and the NY Fed: </div><div>"Q (E.U.): Is the investor protected against the insolvency of an intermediary and, if so, how?</div><div>A (N.Y. Fed): <b>...an investor is always vulnerable to a securities intermediary that does not itself have interests in a financial asset sufficient to cover all of the securities entitlements that it has created in that financial asset... If the secured creditor has 'control' over the financial asset it will have priority over entitlement holders... If the securities intermediary is a clearing corporation, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of entitlement holders."</b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><b>37: "So, there we have it. In the collapse of the clearing subsidiaries of DTCC, it is the secured creditors who will take the assets of the entitlement holders. This is where it is going. It is designed to happen suddenly, and on a vast scale."</b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">38: The author continues: <b>"The CCPs are designed to fail.</b> They are deliberately under-capitalized. The start-up of a new CCP is planned and pre-funded. <b>This construct assures that the secured creditors will take all collateral upon which they will have perfected legal control.</b> [He then continues, sarcastically imitating the justification that will be used] The rule of law must prevail! We would have chaos otherwise!"</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><b>VIII: Bank Holiday</b></div><div dir="ltr"><b>[This chapter gives a good historical review of another textbook example of a "taking" and how it was contrived: the US Depression era "Bank Holiday" under FDR]</b></div><div dir="ltr">40: The 1930 bank holiday: "only the Federal Reserve Banks and banks selected by the Federal Reserve were allowed to reopen." </div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><b>40: "People with money in banks that were not allowed to reopen lost all of it. Their debts were not canceled, however; these were taken over by the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. If these people could not make their debt payments—which was now likely, since they had lost their cash—they lost everything they had financed with any amount of debt, e.g., their house, their car, and their business."</b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div><b>41: See the Cleveland Trust, which was 'selected' to survive by the Federal Reserve, and then selected to consolidate debts:</b> "I had a finance professor who told the class that Cleveland Trust had run a systematic process of foreclosing upon and evicting many thousands of families from their homes in the greater Cleveland area. After these families were evicted from their homes, and their equity wiped out, they were offered the possibility of moving back into their former homes as renters, the advantage to Cleveland Trust being that these families would pay to keep the houses heated until they could be sold. Cleveland Trust did 'well.' How did my finance professor know about this? His family was one of those many thousands of families whose home mortgage had been taken over by Cleveland Trust." <b>[Note that this gives us one good heuristic to help deal with "takings": make sure you do not have possessions that can be foreclosed--which means pay down your debts and get out from under them.]</b></div><div dir="ltr"><br /><div><b>42: "We are led to believe that the Bank Holiday was a brilliant scheme. Well it was--for some. It was enormously successful for those banking interests who took the assets and consolidated their power.</b> It certainly demonstrated the power of 'regime-shifting policies.' We will see that it was not just about taking peoples' homes and other stuff. <b>As to ending the panic, perhaps that is not so difficult to do when you have fomented the panic." [Another thing to pay attention to: governments will often create problems/crises in order to impose their solutions. See also: most wars.]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>43: "Is the Fed indeed 'very sorry'? Can one believe the promise that 'we won't do it again'? They have studied the lessons of the past in detail; however, their purpose has been to prepare a new and improved global version for the spectacular end of this debt expansion super-cycle. That's what this book is about."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>43: "Contrary to the image of success, which has been handed down to us, the Bank Holiday did not end the Great Depression.</b> There was no recovery which might have allowed people to service their debts and keep their property. Why was that? 'Inexplicably', the Federal Reserve kept conditions tight. [The author her quotes the Federal Reserve's own history on the period 1937-38]: </div><div><i><span> </span>According to literature on the subject, the possible causes... were a contraction in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve and Treasury Department policies and contractionary fiscal policies... </i></div><div><b>If that was a comprehensive program to assure there would be no recovery, it worked quite well. Conditions remained broadly stressful for years, and they kept price levels down, so that people had no opportunity to sell assets for paying off debts." </b>[I'm reminded here of the quote "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" although this book certainly shows certain patterns that indicate malice...!]</div></div><div dir="ltr"><div><br /></div><div>43ff: See also 1933 where the Fed "had the means 'to supply unlimited amounts of currency to reopened banks' [per The Emergency Banking Act of 1933], which were, of course, only the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. <b>Clearly, the Fed had had the means all along to avoid the failure of those thousands of banks. A panic can be fomented easily when you run the system. They made it happen.</b> They planned it, and then brought their solution after they got their regime-shifting policies in place."</div><div><br /></div><div>44ff: The Federal Reserve System and the banks selected by the Fed were prepared to take things from people on a vast scale: their homes, their cars, and even their new electric appliances, which had been sold to them with the innovation of consumer credit. Did 'the bankers' need to take this property? What was the real purpose? Can you get past the idea that they were trying to help? </div><div><b> "Ask yourself: if they don't want your money, and they don't really want or need your stuff, and they're not trying to help you, what do they want? What's the point of all of their efforts?</b></div></div><div dir="auto"><b> </b> "This may be difficult to hear: It was deliberate strategy. It was about ultimate, complete power, allowing no centers of resistance. And so, it was about deprivation. It was about subjugation--and it still is, in more ways than we know. <b>It was not about helping people then, and it's not about helping people now.</b> It is all part of the same deliberate herding of humanity and elimination of any pockets of resilience, which plagues us still... This is exactly what is now set up to happen with all securities</div>owned by the public, globally."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45: The Gold Seizure/Executive Order 6102: "The stated reason for the order was that hard times had caused 'hoarding' of gold... However, [from Wikipedia] "the main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the depression."<br /><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="ltr">45: "The executive order to confiscate all gold owned by the public was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 <b>[Just another example of using <i>any</i> law or legal precedent, no matter how far afield you need to go, in order to do what you need to do. This is making me rethink the idea that "rule of law" countries are so much better! Maybe it's more accurate to think of "rule of law" domains as just another type of playing field on which government actions like this are rationalized and justified]</b>, which had been enacted four years after the creation of the Federal Reserve. The act had been used to confiscate the property of interned natives of Germany, and more. This is described by Daniel A. Gross in his article <i>The U.S. Confiscated Half a Billion Dollars in Private Property During WWI</i> [39], whose subtitle reads: 'America's home front was the site of interment, deportation, and vast property seizure.'" [And this is likely where we got the "precedent" for internment and property seizure of Japanese in the USA during WWII.]</div><div dir="ltr"><br /><div><b>45-46: "The rationale is incredible: You are hoarding gold, so we will take it and do what with it? Hoard it!</b> As we have seen, once they had taken the gold of the public, they did not then use the resource to expand credit. People remained in a debt trap. The deprivation continued and even worsened. <b>Clearly, the need to expand credit served only as a pretext for the confiscation of the public's gold</b>, which was the real premeditated objective."</div><div><br /></div><div>46: "I asked my father why people had turned in their gold. He said that if you did not you were a criminal, but further, that there was nothing you would be able to do with it because you could not legally transport or sell it. So, essentially, the use and value of gold had been confiscated. This was certainly the case because it remained illegal for a U.S. person to own gold for more than forty years!" <b>[The author leaves out here that the US paid people the then-current market price ($20.67/ounce) for the gold that they turned in. Note also that the US gov't immediately devalued the US dollar in gold terms (to $35, if I remember correctly) thus this actually was a credit expanding and inflationary move here. It's worth noting that these items don't quite fit in with the author's arguments.]</b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>46: "Perhaps gold will not be confiscated immediately this time around. Gold has not been targeted as the essential collateral backing as was the case under the Federal Reserve Act. In this go-round it is securities of all kinds, globally, which have been set-up as the collateral backing underpinning the derivatives complex."</div><div><br /></div><div>47: "And so, large-scale closure of banks and taking of bank deposits is not unprecedented. Holders of cash in banks are unsecured creditors with no enforceable claim to their money... Then all deposits and assets will be taken by the 'protected class' of secured creditors. This is where it is going."</div><div><br /></div><div>47-48: Some wealthy people may think they will hide from this by keeping their money with the 'too big to fail banks.' Perhaps it will seem that they have succeeded in this through the early stages of the banking crisis. However, this 'regime shift' is designed to be all-encompassing. <b>[Interesting set of assertions here.]</b> ...Ordinarily, the deposit-taking subsidiaries should be quite secure. But a strategy has been set up so that the deposit taking subsidiaries of the 'too big to fail banks' can be separately bankrupted when the time comes. How can we know that? ...The Fed has the power to give exemptions to any bank to move derivatives into deposit-taking subsidiaries, and it has done so. It has been tested, and on a large scale. Apparently it is easily and unilaterally done by the Fed by granting exemptions to Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act. [The author gives examples here of exemptions given to BofA as well as a bunch of other SIFI-size banks: Ally, Fifth Third, CIT, GE Capital, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPM, etc.] ...So individual banks had derivatives books the size of the entire global economy, and they moved them into their deposit-taking subsidiaries with the approval of the Fed."</div><div><br /></div><div>49: "Why has this been tested on such a large scale? It seems they are quite serious about something. Is the intent to make the deposit-taking subsidiaries safer? What is the real purpose?</div> <b>Used at the appropriate time, this will assure the collapse of the deposit taking subsidiaries of the 'too big to fail' banks, allowing the taking of money comprehensively, including from depositors in these deposit-taking subsidiaries, leaving essentially no money anywhere, and no pockets of resilience or of potential resistance.</b> Meanwhile, in the chaos of the ensuing global wave of insolvencies, peppered with contrived existential threats, the 'protected class' of bank holding companies and their subsidiaries designed for continuance will not only survive, but thrive, taking essentially all collateral. <b>This will be put forth as an imperative, i.e., that they must survive and be strong for the sake of humanity,</b> so that the system might begin again and we all might move forward. People will be desperate and simply want the terror to stop."<div><br /></div><div>49: Note also FDIC could easily be "bankrupted" itself: it has at most 128B in funds and can draw up to 100B more at the Fed window; the combined 228B <b>will only cover 2% of insured deposits.</b> (!)</div><div><br /></div><div>50: Resolution powers over the captured banking systems, including around 3,000 banks and other financial institutions, have been conferred to a resolution authority, the Single Resolution Board (SRB), which will execute a Single Resolution Mechanism.</div><div><br /></div><div>51: "The Single Resolution Board has directed the biggest banks to prepare for solvent wind-down (SWD). Again, that sounds like a good thing, but given the scale of the bubble, this cannot possibly mean the solvency of the entire banking system. <b>I suggest that what this means is the preparation of certain portions of the biggest banks to remain solvent."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>53: Thoughts on The Atlantic Council, a military/geopolitical think tank, which is now focusing on CBDCs: Here, one can see that, as of this writing, central banks in 114 countries representing 95% of the global economy are working on CBDC, that 11 countries have fully launched digital currency, that all G7 economies have now moved into the development stage of CBDC, and that 18 of the G20 countries are now in the advanced stage of development."</div><div><br /></div><div>53: "Why would The Atlantic Council, a military strategy think tank, focus on CBDC? We are living within a global hybrid war, a component of which will be the collapse of the banking, money, and payments systems globally... <b>War aims will be achieved by means other than kinetic war. The foremost aim of the people who have privately controlled the central banks and money creation is that they will remain in power, forever. They can risk no pockets of resistance."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>54: See the BIS's Augustin Carstens on a CBDC [the author is right, these comments <i>have</i> gone viral all over social media over the past few years] "We don't know... who's using a $100 bill today and we don't know who's using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>54: "In other words: CBDC means absolute control. And so, if the 'old' money system somehow collapses, new money will be provided by the central banks in the form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the new and improved control system."</b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>54: "Imagine... it is chaos. You have lost everything but your smart phone (If you don't have one, don't worry--you will be issued one.) You will download an app. You will click boxes agreeing to everything. You will become increasingly indebted with each payment you make using the CBDC you are 'given' on your phone. You will be told what to do and what not to do from then on. You will comply if you want to eat."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>IX: The Great Deflation</b></div><div>55: "...in the 1930s, all commodities, with the sole exception of gold, bottomed at the lows of the prior sixty years. Most public companies ceased to exist. They had gone bankrupt. The shareholders were wiped out. The assets were taken by the secured creditors, the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. Price levels did not recover for decades."</div><div><br /></div><div>56: See Tom Nicholas and Anna Scherbina and their paper "Real Estate Prices During the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression" where they write: "Using unique data on real estate transactions, we construct nominal and CPI adjusted hedonic price indices for Manhattan from 1920 to 1939. The CPI adjusted index falls during the recession that followed WWI, rises to a local peak in 1926 and declines again following the collapse of the Florida real estate bubble. It subsequently recovers to reach its highest value in late 1929 before falling by 74 percent at the end of 1932 and hovering around that value until 1939. <b>A typical property bought in the beginning of 1920 would have retained only 41 percent of its initial value two decades later."</b></div> "And this was Manhattan!"<div><br /></div><div>56: There was "little recovery in the price level from the 1920s to the 1950s" despite tremendous demand drivers: electrification (but note this might be a tech-like driver of deflation too), auto and the highway system, telecom and media, air travel, WWII/Korea/the arms race, population growth. The author cites deflationary factors today: AI, robotics, etc. </div><div><br /></div><div>56ff: The Everything Bubble: the author gives an example of a 5% perpetual bond under rate scenarios going to 1% and then back to 5%, then says "The entire global financial complex is, essentially, a big perpetuity, i.e. a financial instrument with no fixed maturity date. The prices of all fixed income instruments are determined by interest rates, and all equity market and commercial real estate values are similarly driven."</div><div><br /></div><div>57: "The Fed created the 'Everything Bubble' with the justification of fighting the Global Financial Crisis, which of course the Fed had also created, by lowering the Fed Funds Rate from 5% to near zero, and then keeping it near zero for most of the past 15 years." </div><div><br /></div><div>57ff: "When the 'Everything Bubble' is imploded, we will face a deflationary depression, which will span many years, even decades. This coming Great Deflation is intrinsic to the Great Taking.</div><div><span> </span>"The Architects of the Great Taking have planned and prepared to use this dynamic fully, secure in their knowledge that, as night follows day, massive and prolonged deflation will certainly follow the epic debt expansion super cycle, which they created.<br /></div><span> </span>"The Architects have assured that they alone are positioned to take everything, and that you and your children are positioned on the other side of that, i.e., to lose everything, to be enslaved and even destroyed by it. People will be knocked down, and not be able to get up again.<b> That is intentional, as the populace has been systematically encouraged to go deeply into debt.</b> Whom the gods would destroy, they first cause to borrow at low rates of interest!"<div><br /></div><div>58: "As in the Great Depression, prolonged deflation will assure that people who are in debt will not be able to make payments on their debts, let alone repay them. They will be trapped. All property and businesses financed with debt will be taken. <b>With profound and persistent deflation assured to stretch over many years, debt becomes a powerful weapon of conquest."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>58ff: On the roots/meaning/etymology of debt, on debt jubilees, etc.</div><div><br /></div><div>59: "This 'Great Reset' is anti-human. <b>It is intended to fix in place a system something like feudalism in perpetuity</b>, in which the populace is held in a state of deprivation and fear with the empty promise of safety. Wake up! We have been living within a protection racket, in which the 'protectors' terrorize the 'protected.' Those supposedly protecting us from the 'bad guys' ARE THE BAD GUYS!"</div><div><br /></div><div><b>X: Conclusion</b></div><div><b>60: [Interesting views and rhetoric in this chapter on the nature of evil, on the standard human inclination to want to stay blind to evil, and on the possible motivations of the architects of this taking/custodial system.]</b> "Do you believe that you are special in some way, that you were being protected, or that you will be protected now? There has been abundant evidence of great evil at work in the world, throughout time and in our present time. Do you really wish to be ignorant of its existence and operation?"</div><div><br /></div><div>61: "If you are wealthy, you might assume that, because the system has allowed them to accumulate wealth, they will be protected in some way, that they are special. You are special. They're saving you for dessert."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>61: "To not know is bad. To not want to know is worse.</b> Willful ignorance of the existence and operation of evil is a luxury even the wealthy can no longer afford."</div><div><br /></div><div>61: "Hybrid war is unlimited. It has no bounds. It is global, and it is inside your head. It is never-ending."</div><div><br /></div><div>61-2: Discussion of Chris Hedges' book <i>Empire of Illusion</i>; on pseudo-events that are mechanisms of control, etc. [See also <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-image-guide-to-pseudo-events-in.html" target="_blank">Daniel Boorstin's book <i>The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America</i></a>.]</div><div><br /></div><div>62: "The people behind the wars have never been investigated and removed from power. They have continued in control of all central banks, and money creation, and have extended their control globally."</div><div><br /></div><div>62: "Wars have always been not so much about taking things as about subjugation of populations on all sides. Vast destruction and death are acceptable to their planners. You might ask, how could the people plotting and executing such insane schemes be held together? I suggest that it has something to do with the binding power of shared guilt, of the criminal pact. The perpetrators are each and all are bound, whether explicitly or unconsciously, by evidence of shameful, treasonous acts committed against their own people."</div><div><br /></div><div>63: "In the past few years, you have been living within an escalating hybrid war. Globally, we have witnessed overt media control and propaganda campaigns; censorship, including arrests of people speaking in public; monitoring of all electronic communications and physical contact tracing; brutally enforced lock down and masking requirements, with people being beaten, handcuffed and arrested, even in their homes; suspension of healthcare services and weakening of healthcare systems; invasive testing requirements for employment and travel; forced quarantine of travelers; and coerced quarantine and 'vaccination' of the healthy general population. <b>Governments dropped all pretense of democracy and were emboldened to practice open despotism. There were no functioning checks on this power. The courts provided no effective recourse to the public.... Are you able to contemplate that this may have been about more than a virus?"</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>63: [Again, very interesting thoughts here.] "I will make a startling assertion. This is not because the power to control is increasing. It is because this power is indeed collapsing. The 'control system' has entered collapse. </b>Their power has been based on deception. Their two great powers of deception, money and media, have been extremely energy-efficient means of control. But these powers are now in rampant collapse. This is why they have moved urgently to institute physical control measures. <b>However, physical control is difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive.</b> And so, they are risking all. They are risking being seen. Is this not a sign of desperation?"</div></div><div dir="ltr"><div><br /></div><div>64: "They promote the belief that they are all-powerful. They are not. All they have had is the power to print money. The rest, they have usurped from humanity."</div><div><br /></div><div>64: "We were told by Hobbes that war is the natural state of man (Hobbes' patrons were 'nobles') <b>[I never ever thought about this!]</b>. But is war natural and inevitable? How did humanity survive? Think about it. Did humans survive by killing each other? It is oxymoronic! War is aberrant. 100% of human survival is based on cooperation. You cannot survive alone."</div><div><br /></div><div>64: "For 99.99% of human history, sociopaths like these would not have survived the next winter. Their nature was seen and they were ostracized from the village, to save the village." <b>[Phenomenal point here: centralized, large-scale nation states tend to select for (and also hide the nature of) sociopathic personality types, but </b><b>in a small scale tribal-type society </b><b>they would be quickly identified and dealt with.] </b>"They operate today through anonymity enabled by inhuman scale of social organization."</div><div><br /></div><div>65: "The 'masterminds' will not yet be known. <b>However, the individuals and organizations near the levers of power</b> (monetary, media, government, 'healthcare', military, police, legal, corporate), operating with criminal intent toward the mass of humanity, <b>can be identified.</b> The allegiances of these functionaries are unstable, driven by narrow self-interest. By directly and personally putting these people on notice that their actions are being documented, and subject to criminal prosecution, they may be impelled to decline further involvement. This process can be accelerated. It is not necessary to wake up the majority! We are not fighting the 1%, but the 0.01%."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Appendix: NY Fed's reply to the EC Legal Certainty Group Questionnaire</b><br /></div><div>[This appendix contains the full text of the New York Federal Reserve's reply to the European Commission Legal Certainty Group Questionnaire.] </div><div><br /></div><div>Some quotes here that grabbed me: </div><div>69: "This response [from the NY Fed]... does not discuss other laws or regulations or rules, which may significantly affect aspects of the indirectly-held securities system, such as securities, tax, accounting, banking laws, regulations or rules, or any other laws, regulations or rules." <b>[Meaning possibly that there are constraints/limits to the legal interpretations here that the author is so worried about because there are many other jurisdictions</b>. Also the response specifically excludes Treasury Direct, which is also striking and indicates perhaps one potentially "safer" place to store capital.]</div><div><br /></div><div>70: "It is important to convey at the outset that Article 8 plays a limited role in the securities markets." "As noted above, many important issues regarding the securities markets in the United States are governed by State and Federal securities laws and regulations..." <b>[again, maybe there are major limits to the author's imagined worst case legal construct]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>74: On segregation of assets here, thus preventing "the entitlement holder to assert rights against any person other than its intermediary, <b>except in the very limited circumstances described below." [The author bolds this part]</b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>76-7: "The first set of obligations relate to the entitlement holder's receipt of the economic and corporate rights that make up the financial asset." "The second set of obligations relate to protecting the entitlement holder from the financial risk of the securities intermediary."</div><div><br /></div><div>77: "The final three obligations relate to complying with entitlement orders or directions from the entitlement holder. An 'entitlement order' directs the securities intermediary to 'transfer or [redeem] a financial asset to which the entitlement holder has a security entitlement.' 8-102(a)(8). The entitlement order only directs the transfer; it is not an order to sell the financial asset. The securities intermediary must comply with an entitlement order, if originated by the entitlement holder and the securities intermediary has (1) reasonable opportunity to assure itself of genuineness and authenticity and (2) reasonable opportunity to comply." <b>[Interesting special case here that probably could easily be weaponized. </b><b>I think I see the point here: the "entitlement holder"--the so-called protected class who wants to "take" these assets per the author's argument--has the ability to seize assets it otherwise wouldn't be able to seize under certain circumstances, which here is called an "entitlement order"</b><b>]</b></div><div><br /></div><div>81: [More discussion of segregated assets] "Under Article 8, an investor is protected against the insolvency of its securities intermediary insofar as the security entitlements credited to the investor's securities account are not part of the securities intermediary's bankruptcy estate (and likewise, an investor is protected from the insolvency of an upper-tier intermediary)."</div><div><br /></div><div>81ff: [... but then exceptions to the above] <b>"an investor is always vulnerable to a securities intermediary that does not itself have interests in a financial asset sufficient to cover all of the securities entitlements that it has created in that financial asset."</b> and then <b>"The interests of an entitlement holder in the financial assets trump the interests of any of the securities intermediary's creditors that have a security interest in the same financial asset." [Again, you could see how this language could easily be weaponized.]</b></div><div><div><br /></div><div>82: [Then two exceptions to the above exceptions(!)] 1) if you have "control" of the asset: "If the secured creditor has 'control' over the financial asset it will have priority over entitlement holders who have securities entitlement with respect to that financial asset." and 2) "If the securities intermediary is a clearing corporation, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of entitlement holders. (This second exception is to allow for the secured financing that aids in clearing corporations' settlement activities.)"</div><div><br /></div><div>83: The "indirect holding system" of securities for securities transfers, where "security entitlements are created and extinguished--that accomplishes the settlement of securities transactions, much like a payment of bank money." Example here: "Operationally, Party A, having a securities account at Securities Intermediary X containing a security entitlement to Security I, might instruct its Securities Intermediary X to transfer or deliver Security I to Party B, also having a securities account at Security Intermediary X. Securities Intermediary X will simultaneously create a security entitlement to Security I in Party B's securities account and extinguish the security entitlement to Security I in Party A's securities account."</div><div><br /></div><div>85ff: On priority of claims asserted against an intermediary: "shortfalls" (if the broker/intermediary doesn't have client assets it should have: this was covered in Chapter V); On physical securities and what happens when they are destroyed or damaged; on (security) voting rights.</div><div><br /></div><div>92: Foreign securities: subject to foreign laws of that jurisdiction; "an investor holding through a foreign intermediary might not have its rights determined under Article 8 unless the account agreement had the appropriate selection. In the event of the insolvency of the intermediary, the 'lex concursus' will determine the rights of the investors. In the United States, the relevant insolvency law will differ depending on the type of entity (bank, broker/dealer) that acts as intermediary.</div><div><br /><b>Terms:</b></div><div><b>ICSD:</b> International Central Security Depository (central database of a sort that records security positions and by which creditors can claim those securities as "collateral")<br /></div><div><b>CCPs:</b> Central Clearing Parties: institutions that take on counterparty risk between parties to a transaction and provide clearing and settlement for trades in foreign exchange, securities, options and (most importantly) derivative contracts. If a participant fails, the CCP assumes the obligations of the failed clearing participant. The CCP combines the exposures to all clearing members on its balance sheet.</div><div><b>Entitlement holder:</b> the person or entity having a security entitlement to a financial asset against its securities intermediary (the "investor" or "customer").<br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>See also:</b> </div><div>Free public domain PDF of <i>The Great Taking:</i> <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thegreattaking.com/&source=gmail&ust=1704659196595000&usg=AOvVaw0lrhRyMxcT16snlFx6Ilam" href="https://thegreattaking.com/" target="_blank">https://thegreattaking.<wbr></wbr>com/</a> </div><div>Atlantic Council: Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/&source=gmail&ust=1704659196595000&usg=AOvVaw0q8Q5y8MrltDWK2mAlMbUr" href="https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/" target="_blank">https://www.atlanticcouncil.<wbr></wbr>org/cbdctracker/</a><br /></div><div>The Great Taking on Twitter <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/TakingGrea53073&source=gmail&ust=1704659196595000&usg=AOvVaw08ug6CxzuXmpQn5KJYXPv7" href="https://twitter.com/TakingGrea53073" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/<wbr></wbr>TakingGrea53073</a></div><div><br /></div></div><div><b>To Read:</b> </div><div>Allan H. Meltzer: <i>A History of the Federal Reserve</i></div><div>E. Guttmann: <i>Modern Securities Transfers</i><br /></div><div>M. Friedman and A. J. Schwartz: <i>A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960</i><br /></div><div>***Chris Hedges: <i>Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle</i><br /></div><div>Anonymous: Recession of 1937–38. 2013. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession-of-1937-38&source=gmail&ust=1704659196595000&usg=AOvVaw01_ju_8LmR-XWoig6IUqlG" href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/recession-of-1937-38" target="_blank">https://www.<wbr></wbr>federalreservehistory.org/<wbr></wbr>essays/recession-of-1937-38</a> </div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-80903392699829912542024-01-29T04:16:00.000-08:002024-02-01T16:05:12.290-08:00Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky [more spoilers]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Readable fantasy/sci-fi hybrid, just like the other two volumes of Adrian Tchaikovsky's <i>Children of Memory</i> trilogy. </div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[See my reviews of <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/12/children-of-time-by-adrian-tchaikovsky.html" target="_blank">book 1, <i>Children of Time</i></a>, and <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/01/children-of-ruin-by-adrian-tchaikovsky.html" target="_blank">book 2, </a><i><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2024/01/children-of-ruin-by-adrian-tchaikovsky.html" target="_blank">Children of Ruin</a>.</i>]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is a layered, complicated and at times confusing story. It's not without promise, and in it an accommodating reader will find certain thought-provoking ponderings on sentience, on the nature of the self, and on the nature of the real. And if you enjoy magical realism and puzzle-like plots where the reader can't really figure what's going until the end, I'd recommend it. See for example, <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/07/piranesi-by-susanna-clarke-review-short.html" target="_blank">Susanna Clarke's unusual novel <i>Piranesi</i>, where the reader spends most of the novel in the dark</a>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Ulimately, however, the book frustrates. When we learn <b>[spoiler incoming!]</b> "it was all a simulation," the lifeblood seems to rush out of all the promising mysterious and psychological elements of the novel, and the reader limps through the last pages, deflated. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">If you've read this far and think this novel might interest you, go ahead and read it. If you think it might frustrate or irritate you, then think of this trilogy like the old <i>Matrix</i> movies: just pretend they made only one. And skip the rest of this review!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">A few quick additional paragraphs on the story. The reader re-greets many of our characters from books one and two: members of our spider family, our octopus family, our human characters and of course the "goo collective" which is embodied in one of the human characters. In a parallel narrative, we learn about a small human colony on a planet called Imir, also refugees from a long-ago destroyed Earth. This colony is "under observation" by a research team built from peoples of the trilogy's first two novels.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">I mentioned above this novel's discussion of sentience and the self. One character, a human who consented to embodying the goo collective, has multiple "selves" by design and struggles to organize who she literally is. Imagine method acting <i>all the time</i>, like some multi-personaed Marlon Brando. Other characters help the reader think through the nature of sentience, and for this thematic purpose our author introduces us to <i>another</i> new species, the Corvids, who are extraordinarily intelligent crows who operate in pairs. One notes changes in an environment, the other puzzles out what those changes mean. Combined, they have a <i>sort</i> of sentience--sort of--which sets up another intriguing philosophical component of the novel.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The author works in psychological and folkloric elements as well. The human colony appears to operate under a tremendous guilt burden, which the reader discovers gradually. Our key protagonist from this colony, Liff, plays a sort of "Goldilocks in the dark forest" role in a setting that could right come out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_and_Sad_Tale_of_Innocent_Er%C3%A9ndira_and_Her_Heartless_Grandmother" target="_blank"><i>Er</i></a><span style="color: #0000ee;"><i><u>é</u></i></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_and_Sad_Tale_of_Innocent_Er%C3%A9ndira_and_Her_Heartless_Grandmother" target="_blank"><i>ndira</i> comes to mind</a>).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[More spoilers incoming]</b> The research team, while living embedded with the human colony, has to grapple with a sort of Star Trek "prime directive" problem: to what extent should they interfere with this colony to save it, especially when it becomes obvious that it cannot survive?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Unfortunately, what frustrates (honestly, irritates) the reader is just as we begin to care about this colony, we're told <i>they never really lived at all</i>. They "survive" now only as an iterative, recorded simulation running on some ancient device buried in the planet's crust. Think of this device as the novel's Macguffin, oiling up the story to make it work. Unfortunately, there is so much expository required to explain this device, how it worked, and then <i>re-explain</i> to the reader what actually has been happening all along that the story loses its weight and force. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* Our protagonists arrive at a planet that is habitable, but not habitable enough to sustain a colony permanently. As the enter the atmosphere, they pick up a curious signal emanating from the planet's surface. This turns out to be, retrospectively, a sort of partial clue for the reader but there's no way to know it at this point in the narrative.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">* We meet Liff, she gets lost in the woods and meets two beings: Gethli and Gothi, the Corvids.</div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Portia reappears, also Fabian, Bianca, Paul the Octopus and Jodry a human. Also Avrana Kern, the AI program.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">* The humans on Imir have regressed, they are losing their technology, they are close-minded and xenophobic, the planet is kind of like a 1990s-era Cuba with re-re-re-renovated vehicles and tractors, etc., as this culture tries to hang on to technology they can no longer produce from scratch.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto">* The reader now can figure out at this point that the Imir planet family of Miranda, Paul, Portia and Fabian have somehow taken human form and are embedded within the Imir colony, observing their collapse.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "We're looking for something that's become lost."</div><div dir="auto">"What is it?"</div><div dir="auto">"A survey team."</div><div dir="auto">[Again, clues here as to what's going on]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The survey team is seized and hanged by the townspeople.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Backstory on the Corvids/birds and their development on the planet Rourke, with chemistry that caused toxic buildup, cancers, birth defects, etc., in all animals: only corvids and ants seemed to make it there. The corvids form cognitive pairs, one sees before/after differences, the other is a sort of an unself-aware problem-solver. The reader now gets explanations for the weird behavior of the corvid characters Gethli and Gothi, sort of the novel's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They have a predilection for dropping literary quotes from Virginia Woolf, Tennyson, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The time horizon of the story changes, and now we're back to the first couple of generations of this planet; how they had to leave many of the crew in stasis up in orbit, they couldn't bring everybody down; this meant leaving them to die as the ship in orbit gradually lost power. The Liff character is suddenly way beyond her years here, it's not quite believable.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "Listen, I don't precisely know why it's you I need to have this conversation with, but the birds have you in their sight, and that means I can come to <i>you</i> without introducing more chaos into the system." Here the reader can figure out "the Witch" is Avrana Kern, and we get another clue as to what's going on. The witch/fairytale/crows paradigm is an interesting vehicle to tell this part of the story. Liff brings Miranda to the Witch: "Who is this girl, and why is she important?" The reader still doesn't really know what's going on yet. Nor do the characters themselves.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* There's a famine, the initial colony setup wasn't stable although it took many generations to play out. "We came just in time to record their last days." Liff and the survey team feel like they live multiple realities, maybe at the same time, but it turns out that the colony died out, but was preserved as a simulation by some alien computer buried in the planet's crust. A weird story element. Does it work? Extensive, extensive expository required here to bring the reader up to speed.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Yes the colony died out; Liff is the last, she starves; the simulation re-runs it over and over again. But then this machine played a simulation <i>including Miranda</i> (sort of an observer effect, kind of meta). This machine is the mother of all Macguffins: an arbitrary item or device that needs to be added so that the story can actually be possible. <b>[Also note this tungsten-coated sentence describing it: "It's a relic of a civilization that strode the stars long before humanity ever reached orbit." That should not have survived editing.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The character Miranda spends quite a lot of narrative trying to grapple with what the hell just happened to her, what happened to fracture her being, her self. Nobody seems to want to talk to her about it, they're more curious about the simulation itself: its fidelity, what the technology teaches them, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Philosophical thoughts about comparing a simulation with the real when you can't tell the difference; also learning that you <i>were</i> within a simulated environment but you couldn't tell at all; was <i>that</i> real? Is it still real?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* In a discussion on the nature of sentience, the Corvids Gothi and Gethli drop a verbal nuke on everybody else: <b>"You'd think we think, but we have thought about the subject and come to the considered conclusion that we do not think. All that passes between us and within us is just mechanical complexity."</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The humans in this story would rather <i>project</i> sentience on things that <i>appear</i> sentient but aren't. <b>Further, that sentience itself may only be an illusion of a self-proclaimed sentient: this illusion is just manufactured by sufficient complexity in the neural system, the brain. Thus sentience itself may just be a simulation! </b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Kind of funny that the Corvids choose the epistemically humble (or is it the lazy?) route and decide they are not sentient. <b>"We think that it is better not to be sentient. Imagine how hard that would be, to actually have to <i>think</i> about things all the time."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Also on deciding on the importance of events that were or appeared perfectly "real" but turn out to be simulations in retrospect: one way to handle this is to say that "it's not important: it doesn't <i>matter</i> whether the here and now (or the then) is a simulation--if it's indistinguishable then it doesn't matter." Just like sentience: if sentience is indistinguishable from the illusion of sentience then it doesn't matter, just call it sentience. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* <b>Also note this intriguing comment from the Corvids that really shakes everyone out of their solipsism: "Imagine how it feels for the simulation."</b> We'll soon see the relevance of this quote. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The reader now learns this simulation/reality problem has yet another layer, and it's much worse: <i>the simulation isn't even of anything that was real</i>. The shuttle the original colonists managed to get off the mothership never survived atmospheric entry. All there was of the colony was a crash site: <i>no one ever lived at all.</i> [<b>I think what might be quite frustrating to a reader right now is to learn after 300 pages of reading, about half of this book never existed in the first place.]</b> Note here the reader is treated to another leaden sentence about the Macguffin/simulation machine that should <i>never</i> have survived editing: "But when the shuttle systems failed, and Holt and the others fell from the sky, invisible hands were spread to catch them."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Miranda advocates for going back into the simulation itself and rescuing some of the simulation beings [now the reader is asked to consider the possible sentience of a "being" that exists inside a simulation]; the "original Miranda" comes to meet "simulated Miranda" in the simulation; they have sort of a mother-daughter conversation ("I'm proud of you/you've accomplished something great/so brave" etc.); Miranda goes back into the simulation with the AI/Avrana Kern character to visit Liff, but this time she goes in with "moderator privileges" so we get a meta-Macguffin on top of the original Macguffin. The book ends with Liff reaching out to the potential sentience of the simulation itself. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Jennifer Ackerman: <i>The Genius of Birds</i></div><div dir="auto">Bernd Heinrich: <i>Mind of the Raven</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab [Again, props to this novelist for teaching me a bunch of new words]:</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>Gallimaufry</i>: a confused jumble or medley of things; "a glorious gallimaufry of childhood perceptions"; </div><div dir="auto">also: a dish made from diced or minced meat, especially a hash or ragout</div><div dir="auto"><i>Pareidolia</i>: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness</div><div dir="auto"><i>Louring</i>: (also lowering): to look sullen, to frown; to be or become dark, gloomy, and threatening "an overcast sky lowered over the village"</div><div dir="auto"><i>Saprophyte</i>: a plant, fungus, or microorganism that lives on dead or decaying organic matter</div><div dir="auto"><i>Imago</i>: in entomology: the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect, typically winged; in psychoanalysis: an unconscious idealized mental image of someone, especially a parent, which influences a person's behavior</div><div dir="auto"><i>Benthic</i>: of, relating to, or occurring at the bottom of the depths of the ocean. The "benthic zone" is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><i>Myxomatosized</i>: having myxomatosis, or symptoms of myxomatosis, a severe viral infection affecting rabbits</div><div dir="auto"><i>Gnomic</i>: adjectival form of "gnomes"; something written in short, pithy maxims or aphorisms</div></div><div dir="auto"><i>Disaster taxon</i>: A pioneer organism, plural "disaster taxa"; is an organism that colonizes a previously empty area first, or one that repopulates vacant niches after a natural disaster, mass extinction or any other catastrophic event that wipes out most life of the prior biome</div><div dir="auto"><i>Cenotaph</i>: a monument to someone buried elsewhere, especially one commemorating people who died in a war. From the Greek words for empty tomb</div><div dir="auto"><i>Strandline</i>: a high water mark; shoreline, especially a shoreline above the present water level</div><div dir="auto"><i>Genius loci</i>: In classical Roman religion, a genius loci was the protective spirit of a place. It was often depicted in religious iconography as a figure holding attributes such as a cornucopia, patera (libation bowl), or snake</div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-65237475305035906092024-01-27T05:21:00.000-08:002024-01-30T13:45:12.107-08:00The Odds Against Me by John Scarne [autobiography]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">Anyone into magic and card tricks likely already knows everything there is to know about John Scarne, since he's arguably history's most important card operator. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Until I'd read Ian Fleming's <i>Moonraker</i> (see below), I had never even <i>heard</i> of this guy, and I don't care in the least about magic or cards. Yet I found this autobiography absolutely loaded with useful insights and great 20th century history. Scarne seems to rub elbows with nearly everybody: there are stories about gangsters including Al Capone and Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein (who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series); stories about the vaudeville era, including Scarne's long friendship with Harry Houdini; all <i>kinds</i> of stories from the New York City Prohibition/speakeasy era, and fascinating stories from New Jersey history too, including some wonderful old-time boxing stories, as Scarne was a lifetime friend of heavyweight champion Jimmy Braddock.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">And there's a <i>tremendous</i> chapter on the Cuban revolution: Scarne was there too, helping to run casinos, reduce cheating and establish fair gambling policies. Fidel Castro even lived next door to Scarne for a while, taking an adjacent suite in the same Hilton Scarne managed. Actually Castro took <i>two</i> suites, according to Scarne: one for handling government affairs, the other for banging chicks (mostly Americans).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, this book gives all kinds of thoughts and insights on how <i>not</i> to get hustled--not just in gambling, cards or dice, but in life. What a pleasure to read!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;">I stumbled onto this book <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/12/moonraker-by-ian-fleming-review-short.html" target="_blank">in Ian Fleming's <i>Moonraker,</i> thanks to that book's wonderful "bridge hand" chapter</a> where Bond hustles the villain Drax by switching card decks. Fleming describes Bond preparing for this card game by going to his bookshelf and getting his copy of <i>Scarne on Cards</i>. And with that oblique throwaway reference I fell down the rabbit hole that is John Scarne's life. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">One minor criticism: all of the book's dialogue is in "as remembered" style, and Scarne writes out his various conversations in a weirdly stilted way. People simply do not talk like this. You'll see exactly what I mean when you read the book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Scarne comes across as a man who stays curious his whole life, who asks questions, learns constantly, and--with two prominent exceptions--remains humble. One of these exceptions was ironic: as much a success he was as a magician and card mechanic, he <i>never</i> could seem to learn from his constant failures marketing his various board games. The other exception, a fascinating one, was Scarne's strangely incontinent dispute with Ed Thorp. Scarne attempted to discredit Thorp's "Beat the Dealer" blackjack strategies, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080209122941/http://www.casinoplayer.com/archive/0702cp/blackjack_part1.htm" target="_blank">publicly claiming they didn't work</a>. There were bets and <a href="https://casetext.com/case/thorp-v-scarne" target="_blank">lawsuits between them</a>, and it appears to be generally agreed that <a href="https://wizardofvegas.com/articles/people-in-gambling-two/" target="_blank">Scarne emerged the loser from this conflict</a>.</div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[PS: <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-man-for-all-markets-by-edward-o-thorp.html" target="_blank">You can find my review of Thorp's autobiography here</a>]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Meeting My First Card Cheats</b></div><div dir="auto">1) Scarnecchia was his parents' surname; they emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region (some hundred miles east of Rome) to America in the early 1900s. They came through New York, went to Steubenville, Ohio (of all places), where his father found work in a steel mill; Scarne was born in 1904; his parents and older sister fell into financial distress as coal strikes throughout the country idled the steel industry; the family relocated to New Jersey where his mother's brother lived.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2) He drops his rather Italianate name Orlando Carmelo Scarnecchia for "John." Gambling was everywhere when he was young and he dreamed of becoming a great gambler as a boy. It seemed to him like the only way to make money. The reader will see a profound evolution in Scarne over the course of his life, ultimately he recommends most everyone avoid gambling at all costs. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">3) At around age ten he instantly grasps a card game that his father, uncle and their friends were playing: Scarne instinctively counted the cards, and knew that his father shouldn't have drawn a card; his uncle realizes he has more card sense than all of them put together: "Remind me not to play cards for money with him when he grows up."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4) As a kid he starts hanging around a gambler named Lucky near an amusement park in North Bergen, NJ. Lucky teaches him swindles like three card monte and the three shell game. He watches Lucky cheat at poker and win a $90 pot--equivalent to what Scarne's father would earn in three weeks of hard labor.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5) He teaches himself how to stack aces and deal himself four aces in a poker hand, practicing in front of a mirror to perfect his technique.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6) 1919: He spends time in West New York, NJ: there was a restaurant there that held card gambling games in the basement without police interference. Scarne joins in (he's around age 15), playing a game called Banker and Broker with much older men. Scarne knew he was being cheated, but wasn't sure exactly how at first: he then realizes the deck is "shaved" with uneven edges on certain cards. He exposes the card cheat to the other guys and they have a huge fight with knives and bottles.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: A Postgraduate Course in Marked Cards and Crooked Dice</b></div><div dir="auto">7) Scarne gets religion about being a card shark, understanding there's much more danger to it than he realized; also his mother tells him how sinful it is to cheat at cards; she persuades him to be a magician. He invents different card tricks, learns how to cut all four aces from the deck at will, he invents "the card in the wallet" trick, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">8) He discovers a small shop selling "belly stripper" cards, where the high value cards are trimmed about a 1/32nd of an inch off each side, and the low cards were trimmed in a convex fashion on the same side, "so that each low card was slightly wider than a high card at the center and slightly narrower at the ends." When the low and high cards were shuffled he only had to grasp the deck at the center, cut the cards, and the bottom card of the cutoff portion would always be a low card; if you grip the deck near the ends and cut, you would always cut to a high card. Scarne is on one level disgusted by the existence of such things but yet fascinated by other stuff the store sells, like different kinds of dice; the shop owner Ame teaches Scarne how loaded dice are made with a tiny copper slug drilled into the holes.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>9) [One clear takeaway so far for an attentive reader: Scarne finds no shortage of people who enjoy answering his questions: people love to talk about what they do and what they know. Most of the time <i>nobody</i> shows interest in what people know or think. You can learn a lot (and spread a good vibe while learning!) by asking people questions about what they do and why: it's a way of showing interest in them and it helps you both.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10) Testing a loaded die by dropping it into a glass of water gently; see also the "pivot test" to test for a load: hold the die extremely gently between two fingers by the corners and you see the die pivot if there's a load; you have to test all four combinations of the corners.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11) Six-Ace Flats dice: they are brick shaped so the six/one side has greater surface area than the other side. Also "tops and bottoms" dice that have numbers 1, 3 and 5 repeated twice, you can only see three sides of the cube at a view, so you can use these periodically in a dice game, surreptitiously switching them in and out of the game with true dice.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12) On marked cards: professional cheats call marked cards "paper"; amateur cheats call them "readers"; Ame (the store owner from above) would steam off the revenue stamp from the card deck box, mark the cards, then reseal the label.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13) Scarne: "I probably met and saw more crooked gamblers in those few months than any average cheater would meet in a lifetime."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">14) Scarne also gauges his ability with cards compared to others: he sees this guy Feeney who is considered one of the best second and bottom dealers around New Jersey; Scarne was surprised: the guy seemed clumsy and obvious to him. He also learns what "steerers" are: pretty girls that steer suckers to a dice or card game.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Fire Eaters, Sword Swallowers, and Carnival Gyps</b></div><div dir="auto">15) Scarne teaches himself different types of card cutting techniques (the Pass, the Hop); he discovers false shuffles and peeks; he has no idea that these are the most difficult moves to master in card manipulation, he assumes that most everybody can do these tricks.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16) A magician from the local fair's big tent show (this was The Great Dagmar, who went on to become a top flight vaudeville magician) tells him "if you ever decide to go into show business you'd better shorten your last name. No one will be able to pronounce it, let alone remember it, as it is." He and this magician trade tricks; <b>"This is when I first realized that a top-notch gambler cheat (the magician of the underworld) was considerably more adept at sleight of hand than a first rate magician--the magician is free to use a great deal of conversation and misdirection to fool his audience, but a card, dice or gambling cheat is limited by the game's regulations."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">17) He learns fire-eating from one of the other performers, a Cherokee.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">18) His mother returns home from an extended trip to Italy, during this trip his father died suddenly of a heart attack and was buried in Italy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19) He gets a job at a local diner just by being in the right place at the right time, soon he gets paid extra to do card tricks as entertainment there; a lot of well-known people come to this diner and so his career and reputation start to get off the ground, he gets gigs, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">20) He keeps "reinvesting" into his career: continues to go to carnivals to learn as much as he can about "flatties" and "grifters" (operators of crooked carnival games). <b>He develops methods for getting people to talk about their techniques. "Like most gambling cheats I have met throughout the world in my life, carnival flatties like to show off their skill in front of other members of the grift." </b>Scarne also takes a political candidate through a carnival and explains all the rigged games. The politician takes him over to police headquarters to give a talk to the chief of police.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22) Scarne meets Henny Youngman in a business card store.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23) Sidebar here on different strategy games and board games that he invented (and later pulled from the market) like Scarnee and Teeko. There will be much more discussion of this (and Scarne's persistant inability to make money selling these board games!) later in the book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">24) He takes a course in elocution, studying voice and diction; keeps trying to spot new techniques for card cheats and dice cheats, trying to find new angles.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Meeting the Racket Bosses of the Roaring Twenties</b></div><div dir="auto">25) Prohibition causes lots of law-abiding citizens to enter into various conspiracies: Prohibition laws are deeply unpopular, also interesting comments here from Scarne on low civilizational morals and implications thereof: <b>"Bootleggers and racketeers were glorified, accepted socially and paid homage to by the millions of Americans who believed that Prohibition was a joke. ... In those days many were prouder to shake hands with Arnold Rothstein [Rothstein was nicknamed "The Brain," he's the guy who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series], America's kingpin gambler, or Al Capone, the Chicago racket boss, than Calvin Coolidge, the President of the United States."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">26) He meets Rothstein at a performance in Tammany Hall; Rothstein hires him for a private gig, just for him and his henchmen. Rothstein hired him several nights in a row, each time having Scarne do the ace-cutting trick in front of his best card cheats, all of whom claimed they could figure out his method. Nobody could figure it out.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27) He meets the Hiker (a card cheat), who tells him they could earn at least a hundred thousand dollars at a resort in Hot Springs, Arkansas, separating wealthy business tycoons from their money in high-stakes poker games using Scarne's various shuffle techniques. Scarne refuses, saying he won't cheat other players. The Hiker responds, "Johnny, I wish I thought that way when I was your age." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">28) Also: note Arnold Rothstein was later gunned down in his apartment over an argument over a crooked game.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">29) His childhood friend Jimmy Braddock starts off his boxing career; Scarne meets the "cauliflower set" [holy cow what a great expression!].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">30) In the 20s Scarne did card tricks for Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, all kinds of people in speakeasies in training camps all over New York and New Jersey; he also meets Marty "O'Brien" Sinatra's eight-year-old Frank in Hoboken.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">31) He gets invited to perform in front of the "mayor" of Chicago; it turns out to be Al Capone, Scarne doesn't know until the very last minute. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">32) He helps Jack "Doc" Kearns identify percentage losses in a private gambling game, then Kearns tells him some of the things he does in boxing like switching gloves to ensure his fighter gets "the best of it."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">33) He does a performance in Chicago for a meeting of Al Capone's top mobsters from all over the country. The minute Scarne recognizes Al Capone his nervousness disappears completely. "And to this day I can't explain the reason." Scarne ends up getting a standing ovation from a huge room full of mobsters.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Fooling America's Greatest Magicians</b></div><div dir="auto">34) The "Miracle Man": a kooky run-down broke guy who makes dollar bills walk across the bar, can stop a clock, etc. It's interesting Scarne never gives away this guy's secrets to his tricks despite the fact that he almost certainly knew not only how he did them but learned some of them himself.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">35) The problems of doing card tricks in a large theater, no one can see!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36) It's interesting also to see Scarne gradually figure out that he's really good at what he does, but it doesn't make him arrogant: he works like crazy, and also his experience entertaining Rothstein and his mobster/cardshark friends made him realize that no audience would ever be harder or harsher: this gave him still more confidence.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">37) He wants to learn more traditional magic, he starts scouting the top magicians in action, seeing all the shows at the vaudeville houses in and around New York City, watching acts.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38) "The vanishing and reappearing lady trick was simple to do and could be performed by any person who had $600 with which to buy the illusion and who could secure the services of a pair of female twins."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">39) He shows his card tricks to Harry Houdini, who is blown away; becomes friends with Houdini, also Scarne cites Houdini's crusade against fraudulent mediums and charlatans (more on this in the next chapter).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">40) Scarne develops a reputation as the magician who fools magicians, all the other guys are talking about him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: My Psychic Experiences with Harry Houdini</b></div><div dir="auto">41) Harry Houdini's advice to Scarne: <b>"Johnny, here's a bit of advice that I found out to be true during my lifetime--you take it for what it's worth. You'll be told by your magician friends that they want to see you get ahead. They do, but not too far ahead. The farther you get ahead the more your magician friends will turn against you."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">42) Scarne starts exposing mediums in New Jersey: Madame Olga in Jersey City, also the Egyptian fakir Rahman Bey; On using shills ("shillabers" as Scarne puts it) to find customers and learn things about them; note also the use of "good guesses": all you have to do is get one right and the client will forget all the wrong guesses. <b>Note also the use of the "one-ahead" technique</b>, you read the question from the sealed envelope of your known associate, and then open it to show you're correct, but you're actually opening the envelope of the <i>next</i> person's question so you can read that person's question in advance.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43) Interesting quote here from Houdini about people playing both sides of a scam [in this case psychic research, but see below]: "Houdini continued, 'Johnny, it's a well-known fact that a few intellectual members of psychical research societies have played both sides of the fence at the same time. Their duty is to ferret out psychic frauds, but instead they keep foisting one psychic hoax after another on the public and on their brother members. These chiselers do this in order to have a reason to ask their brother members for donations to continue their phony so-called research. The psychical crowd are not only very often duped by stage hypnotists, fraudulent mediums, and the self-styled clairvoyants, but are also made fools of by a few of their double-crossing members who are supposed to investigate psychic phenomena but instead keep endorsing hoaxes to the honest but credulous seekers of psychic phenomena.' ... 'Harry, I never thought that any scientist or doctor would stoop so low as to play two sides of the fence and betray the scientific world.'" [Note how this is an example of a sort of approved opposition/limited hangout, and one can see how this would easily be repurposed to apply to things like arbitrary pandemic policy or novel biotherapy injections just as well: you have doctors who may help expose the lack of science behind the most laughable of pandemic policy (like the made-up "6 feet of social distancing") while remaining curiously unwilling to talk about "less safe" topics (like harms from mRNA injections).]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44) On using "horses": professional subjects deliberately chosen from the audience who don't feel physical pain or can pretend to be hypnotized, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45) Interesting debate here on the reality/fakery of hypnotism between Houdini and Scarne on pages 212-220. They discuss the famous hypnotist from 1870-era Paris, Dr. Charcot (Houdini actually knew his "horse," Tommy Minnock, who had an exceptionally high pain tolerance), Mesmer (examined by Lavoisier and Ben Franklin, found to be making false claims and forced to leave France); also on hypnotist's subjects' "fear to disobey."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46) Houdini starts to have trouble filling theaters as his acts become repetitive; then he died suddenly in 1926 of appendicitis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: A Bet with the Secret Service and a Performance for President Roosevelt</b></div><div dir="auto">47) Scarne starts practicing escape routines, nearly dies during a stunt in the Hackensack River. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48) He never deals cards in card games now: everyone assumes that he'll deal himself a winning hand, or if he ever happens to have a winning hand it's assumed he dealt it on purpose. (!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49) He learns dice "bust out" moves from Con Baker, a famous dice bust out artist, in Jersey City. Baker made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of Capone's henchman, oil barons, etc., but ended up paying shakedown payments to professional killers and died penniless at age 37.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">50) Discussion here of Jimmy Braddock, Scarne's childhood friend who grew up to become a famous New Jersey fighter; Braddock during one of his important fights on the way to a title, his TKO over Tuffy Griffiths in 1928. [Braddock went on to become heavyweight champion from 1935 to 1937, losing the title to Joe Louis by KO.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">51) Card tricks for President Roosevelt in Sea Girt, NJ, he blows the president away; and after this gig he gets swamped with vaudeville club bookings.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: My $5,000 Challenge to the Magicians of the World</b></div><div dir="auto">52) See Scarne's public wagers for a head-to-head trick for trick magic competition: free and very effective publicity. Scarne seems to have a knack for this. It's beautiful reading his 1933 publicity brochure from that era (see p 255-6). Such innocence...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">53) "I firmly believe that at the time I issued my $5,000 challenge to the magicians of the world, although I was only thirty years of age, I was at my peak of proficiency in all-round sleight-of-hand magic." Peak at age 30...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54) He orders too many of his new board game "Scarne," it doesn't sell; of the 5000 he orders, he ends up burning the 4700 left over that he couldn't sell. "This was not the last game-burning incident in my life. It was repeated on seven different occasions, during the next twenty-seven years, with various other games that I marketed and later improved. However, as I reflect back through the years, I am happy to state that in spite of my many game failures I had the stick-to-itiveness to continue my game experiments. These many long years of assiduous experimentation on games was motivated by my firm belief that someday I would go down in history as the inventor of a series of skill games that surpassed checkers and chess both in strategy and in world popularity." <b>[I think it's safe to say that this did not happen, and Scarne, for all his astounding gifts, wasn't exactly the most astute businessman when it came to game design and marketing.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">55) On writing <i>Scarne on Dice</i>; also on Johnny Winn, who developed the modern craps game where you can bet "two ways" (the so-called Philadelphia layout, with a don't pass line).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">56) Scarne stays with boxing champ Primo Carnera in 1934 at the champ's training camp [in Pompton Lakes, NJ of all places]; Carnera trusts Scarne, they speak Italian together, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">57) 1934: Scarne also suggests a boxing opponent for an important up-and-coming challenger fighter, Corn Griffin; he suggests to Griffin's manager that Griffin fight Jimmy Braddock, who was supposedly washed up at the time (thus an easy victory for Griffin). Scarne could see that the way Griffin fought, Braddock would be able to beat him. Within about a year Braddock ended up winning the heavyweight championship in 1935. [Interesting how Scarne was so intertwined with the New Jersey boxing world; also interesting how he thus was able to entertain so many sports writers and get so much free publicity as a result.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">58) Scarne and Braddock pull kind of a mean magic trick on a woman who runs a little restaurant in Florida outside of Miami, making her think that there are gold pieces inside boiled eggs. She ends up wasting all her egg inventory looking for more gold pieces. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59) Neat story here where he and Jimmy Braddock get pulled into a poker game as patsies to be taken advantage of, and Scarne deals all the right cards to Braddock so that he can win; later a triggerman for Al Capone, Machine Gun Jack McGurn [holy cow these names are actually real!] walks into the suite where they were all playing and mocks the scammer for not recognizing John Scarne! He then asks Scarne to show all of his friends all his tricks: "for the next hour I did tricks for about sixty of the toughest hoodlums that ever infested Miami." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: Gambling in the Army in World War II and What I Did About It</b></div><div dir="auto">60) Scarne gives a demonstration at Fort Dix on crooked dealing and crooked dice. "Any average cheater with a little bit of nerve could really have cleaned up in that outfit... I realized then that all those stories of the big-money winnings some of the cheats and gamblers said they made during the First World War weren't just tall tales." <b>It turns out that many many scammers ended up going into uniform, and the cheating was a far more prevalent and enormous operation in the armed forces than anybody realized.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">61) "What a sweet racket this Army turned out to be. And just think, I was real mad when Uncle Sam first called me." A gambling operator tells Scarne how he operates.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">62) Scarne then travels to all kinds of different Navy and Army training stations and bases all over the country, some of these scenes are amazing: he gets his car shot at, he has to fight a couple of dudes, there's all sorts of crooked gambling all around military bases both inside and in clip joints outside the bases. "That guy Scarne has wised up every chump in the Army and a lot of them on the outside."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">63) Scarne gets smeared in the media by some different articles "brought" to different Broadway media columnists <b>[this is an interesting example of what can happen if you fall out of favor by criminal elements who happen to have connections in the media. We see a similar phenomenon happening to the medical dissident world right now as they are skewered in the MSM by better-connected elites who are pro-narrative]</b>. In Scarne's case, pre-written articles were presented to various columnists, allegedly were from reliable sources, and the columnists printed the information without checking. Scarne was presented as hoaxing the military into making them think he's a gambling expert; one major article actually ran in the <i>New York Mirror</i> (in those days an important New York City paper). <b>[Note also that the angle this particular article takes is fascinating: claiming that the idea that "the armed services are overrun with crooked gambling" is the actual hoax, when this is neither true nor even what Scarne was even claiming! Thus the smear articles take a mistruth, amplify it, and then claim it comes from the mouth of the person they're trying to smear. It's an interesting angle, ruthless and well done. And then furthermore the article implies Scarne, as a pseudo-expert, is getting free publicity--as if this is some kind of grift for him. Oh, how very <i>very</i> familiar: we can see the same smears are being used against certain dissident doctors today using the same playbook!]</b> Ultimately the <i>Mirror</i> ran another article correcting/refuting all the false statements.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">64) Scarne also has a false and incorrect article run on him in the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i>, although it doesn't frame Scarne as a grifter; it actually frames his crusade more or less positively. [As well as Scarne used the media earlier in his career, now the media is using him. This is actually quite a brutal PR battle... Scarne eventually figures out who are some of the people who smeared him, but not all.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">65) Really good story about a performance he did in a room full of generals, at a dinner to honor Sir William Welch (Air Marshal of Great Britain); a major general got him a drink (!) and to Scarne's shocked expression said, "Think nothing of it, Mr. Scarne--orders are orders." Scarne pilfers a thick envelope from Welch during the performance and has to figure out a way to put it back without anyone noticing; it actually contains part of the Allied plans for the invasion of Japan.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">66) After he wraps up his multi-year tour of the US military, the reader learns Scarne didn't accept any money over this entire time and he basically had run out of money! </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Beating the Blackjack and Baccarat Tables: My $100,000 Challenge</b></div><div dir="auto">67) "Professor, the trouble with you is that you're too damn honest. That's why everybody in Fairview says you'll always be broke." Now it's 1947 and Scarne does a speaking tour of betting parlors across the US. It's astounding to see gambling in so many cities across the country in those days: Buffalo, Toledo, blackjack houses all over the country, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">68) He beats the blackjack tables at Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo in Las Vegas.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">69) Side note here on the US Senate Kefauver Hearings on organized gambling across the country and lax enforcement.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">70) And holy shit on this trick he did for Siegel, with the card appearing on the OUTSIDE of the hotel room window. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">71) He walks into another Vegas casino: "I'm John Scarne. Is it all right with the bosses if I sit down and win a thousand dollars playing Black Jack?" He soon gets banned from all Vegas casinos. <b>[Note also that these are all played with one deck shoes dealt to the end! Much easier for the player to win.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>72) Scarne explains how to use a chip stack to "case the deck," tracking the 16 ten-count cards. You keep a 20-chip stack, separate out four for the aces and the remaining sixteen for the ten counts, then run a count by moving your chips off the two stacks. This is how you track everything when the deck gets down to the last 10-20 cards. "And when enough Black Jack players learn this gimmick, one-deck Black Jack is a dead goose."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">73) Scarne predicts various changes coming to casino blackjack: the emergence of card shoes [limits dealer cheating], reshuffles mid-deck or mid-shoe [limits player advantages given the "contiguous probability" aspect of blackjack], muti-deck shoes, cutting out the last several cards from play, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">74) Siegel is murdered some three months after Scarne meets him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75) Note the "DDT on one side of the sugar cube" gaffe where bettors bet which of a pair of sugar cubes a fly will land on. Wow. Scarne teaches Siegel who uses it on NJ rackett boss Willie Moretti.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76) Scarne is thrilled to be openly barred from all the top casinos in the country, after he systematically wins $1,000 at blackjack in several casinos.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77) Jumping ahead to Scarne's blackjack experience later in his life, in the 1950s: Interesting how Scarne mentions how a lack of gambling knowledge by blackjack pit bosses "cost the casino operators an estimated five million in potential winnings during the next few years." The casino pit bosses didn't know the various card count methods and other techniques to give players an advantage in blackjack.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">78) Scarne works for a casino in Havana in the 1950s, and sees some known Vegas "count-down artists and proposition hustlers" ("Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. J." as Scarne calls them) come in the hotel; Scarne warns the casino management that these guys will want to adjust bet sizing beyond casino rules on certain hands that a casino might consider agreeing: they will wait until the deck gets rich and then ask the house to change bet maximums; <b>and then they'll split any hand with face cards, and then double down on the split hands afterwards. The casino sees those as sucker bets, but these are not sucker bets when, for example, the dealer shows a six!</b> If you're running down in a deck and the deck is rich you want to immediately split as many hands as you're playing, and double down as many hands as you possibly can.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79) Discussion here on baccarat strategy and card counting in baccarat; our hustlers Mr. X, Mr. Y and Mr. J. reappear here, now at the baccarat table at the Habana Hilton Casino in Havana, Cuba. <b>[Scarne doesn't give out their names but two of them appear to be <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/a-man-for-all-markets-by-edward-o-thorp.html" target="_blank">the same people Ed Thorp gambles with (playing baccarat), as we see this also talked about in Thorp's own autobiography</a>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">80) Now a number of discussions on Ed Thorp and his various "systems" for gambling: First Scarne tackles Thorp's roulette system that Scarne doesn't think works. <b>[I think <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-eudaemonic-pie-by-thomas-bass.html" target="_blank">anyone who read <i>The Eudemonic Pie</i></a> as well as Thorp's autobiography will be familiar with both the "Eudaemonic" shoe-based computer system as well Thorp's analog proto-computer shoe-based system, both of which predicted <i>quadrants</i> where the ball would land, producing a small player advantage: it sounds like Scarne may not know much about this specific gambling system subdomain.]</b></div><div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto"><b>81) Holy cow, see here how Scarne tells a completely different version of Thorp's 1960's era gambling stories:</b> per Scarne they're nowhere near as impressive as the famous <i>Life</i> Magazine profile (and Thorp's book) makes them sound. Scarne writes here that he talked to all the people that saw Thorp play as Scarne knew everyone at the casinos Thorp played at; also Scarne's allegations on Thorp's baccarat playing are the most damning: Scarne relates what one casino manager asked him, "Scarne, why didn't <i>Life</i> Magazine mention the fact that Thorp and his two buddies lost fifteen thousand dollars trying to hustle our baccarat game?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>82) Scarne and Thorp also disagree totally about whether casinos in Nevada cheat or not:</b> Scarne says he only found two major cases of casino cheating, which he immediately reported to Nevada's Gaming Control Board, while Thorp writes in his book that he thought the Gaming Control Board was <i>completely</i> corrupt and that <i>most</i> casinos cheated players who won consistently. Scarne also points out something [that I also noticed] about Thorp's famous trip to Reno and Lake Tahoe casinos where he and his backers made $11,000 off of a $10,000 bankroll: note that these are 1958-era dollars, but this return didn't seem all that significant to me either, especially when, as Scarne cites, Thorp's backers supposedly won $59,000 at a casino in Cuba around the same time. Thus the $11k shouldn't be seen as that significant given the bankroll size.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>83) Scarne also argues that Thorp's card counting method was already obsolete long before <i>Beat the Dealer</i> came out [it is certainly obsolete now]. Scarne also puts his previously published blackjack betting rules up next to Thorp's rules <i>and they are nearly identical</i>;</b> it's also interesting to note that Thorp used an IBM 704 computer (state of the art in those days), doing calculations with "brute force" while Scarne used math plus intuition to arrive at nearly the same rules. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">84) Scarne then goes through passages of Thorp's book <i>Beat the Dealer</i>, citing errors, mis-citations, incorrect figures, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">85) Scarne then takes aim at other systems: "System Smitty"; also Alan N. Wilson's book <i>The Casino Gambler's Guide</i>, which misquotes and misunderstands Scarne's book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Adviser to Conrad Hilton on Gambling at the Caribe Hilton Casino in Puerto Rico</b></div><div dir="auto">86) Scarne gets a call from Conrad Hilton himself in 1948 for help running Hilton's casino in Puerto Rico, this would be Hilton's first effort at running a hotel outside of the continental United States. (!) Scarne is also asked to help the government of Puerto Rico draft their casino laws.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">87) A team of roulette players start winning and Scarne discovers one of the tables is rigged/magnetized.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>88) He builds a factory to sell his Teeko game, selling over 100,000 copies between 1952 and 1955, but because he didn't manage the business well, losing money on every game sold. (!)</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">89) Scarne hired in as general manager of a casino in Havana while Hilton builds a hotel there; the hotel is scheduled to open in 1958, note that of course Cuba falls to Castro the following year.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">90) 1956: Scarne married his longtime assistant, Steffi Storm, she was 31, he was 53. They have a son nine months later and Scarne names him John Teeko, after his game. (!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: Gambling in More Ways Than One in the Cuban Revolution</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>91) [This chapter is excellent, really fascinating on a lot of levels.]</b> Cuba's general strike; sabotage acts by Castro and his partisans; Life is somewhat dangerous in Havana, but Scarne still goes there to oversee the new Hilton in Havana, this is in April, 1958. The general strike turns out to be a failure.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>92) Interesting to note here that Havana was starting to become so dominant in gambling that Nevada state officials ruled that anyone holding a gambling interest in Cuba would not be permitted to hold an interest in any Nevada Casino. The ultimate result here was many of the key US companies who owned Cuban casinos ended up selling their Cuban interests--just barely in time before the Castro regime confiscated everything. Holy cow, how lucky can you get?</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">93) He gets shot at during an assassination attempt on Santiago Rey, the Batista regime's former minister of the interior: "...that shooting is a reminder to me that everything around here is not as serene as it's made to appear."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">94) He meets Jack Paar and his NBC television show entourage at The Habana Hilton; Paar tells him how two Cuban policemen pulled his driver from his car and started beating him up; it was likely a kidnapping/ransom attempt on Paar.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">95) There's also a bombing in the Hilton hotel shopping area, badly damaging a bunch of stores in the lobby, although no one was hurt. The pit bosses and some of the major employees of the hotel in Hilton Casino start to go back to the United States.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">96) There's a remarkable story here about a high stakes craps game where the hotel runs the craps table with $100 bills stacked into packets of $10k, $5k, $2,500 and $1,000, as if they were like ultra-high value chips; it moved the game along faster. <b>[It really makes you think about all that "bearer currency" back then, and also sums of money that, inflation-adjusted, would be <i>much</i> higher today; also all of this money today would be tracked electronically, with tax reporting and AML filings and reports now! Scarne adds up the sum of money sitting on the craps table at one point and it's $480,000. Remember this is 1958! You could see why Nevada was concerned about Havana taking over the gambling world.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">97) Scarne describes examples of corruption among the owners of the casino; there's a remarkable story about Cuban senator Rolando Masferrer, chairman of Batista's armed services committee, who gambled big, he had his own private army (some 5,000 men) and he would bring armed accomplices in with him when he gambled; he would never pay his losses but he would always collect his winnings. What a total wild west this place was.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">98) New Year's Eve 1958 into January 1st of 1959: Batista flees Cuba and Castro takes power. His wife says "Isn't that wonderful?" but Scarne knows his history: he knows all about the reckless violence that engulfed the country when Gerardo Machado lost control of Cuba to Batista in 1933. Scarne expects the same this time too: a coming period of vengeance killings and partisan violence. He gets his wife and kid out of Cuba. All of a sudden, everyone (including waiters, bartenders, all sorts of different workers in the hotel) starts wearing armbands, carrying guns and looking for Batista sympathizers to round up and execute. Also Scarne's wife had to take a ferry boat to Key West as Cuba's airports were shut down.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">99) Then a whole bunch of looting happened: a bunch of different casinos and hotels were looted by "a howling mob" (Scarne's words) smashing store windows and slot machines.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">100) Castro ultimately ends up staying at the Habana Hilton in the suite next to Scarne and later Scarne shows him some card tricks. A few months later Castro insisted he do the same card trick for the deputy premiere of the Soviet Union who was in Havana at the time. Castro took over two suites: in one suite he conducted military and political business; the other suite is where he banged chicks, mostly Americans.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">101) Interesting comments also about Scarne observing Castro fool most American journalists into believing that he was a "liberator," that he would give up power and hold free elections, etc. The media was well-fooled, journalists loved Castro, they saw him as the second Simon Bolivar.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">102) Communist/Castro regime secret police then moved into the Hilton hotel, armed with machine guns, confiscating the hotel and casino; this is when Scarne decides there and then to leave Havana. He is held and even strip-searched by soldiers at the airport before he gets out. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: My Gambling Mission to Panama and my Senate Appearance</b></div><div dir="auto">103) He's hired by the government of Panama to advise the country on its government-owned casino, why it wasn't making any money. Scarne identifies theft across the entire institution: no internal controls, dealer cheats, dealers colluding with players, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104) He sits at a hearing with the US Senate; shows them crooked dice, gets a ton of positive publicity from it. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">105) Fascinating also to see him conclude the book with the admonition to readers "don't gamble."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Appendix:</b> </div><div dir="auto">106) This part of the book is a (harmless) ten-page advertisement for his board games Teeko, Scarney and Follow the Arrow.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Jack "Doc" Kearns and Oscar Freely: <i>Million Dollar Gate</i></div><div dir="auto">***The short stories of Damon Runyon</div><div dir="auto">Harold S. Smith: <i>I Want to Quit Winners</i> </div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The Amazing World of John Scarne</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne's Magic Tricks</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne on Dice</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne on Cards<br /></i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne on Card Tricks</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Scarne on Teeko</i><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-69396124049377476882024-01-21T03:23:00.000-08:002024-01-21T08:03:11.224-08:00Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky [spoilers]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">In book two of Adrian Tchaikovsky's <i>Children of Time</i> trilogy (<a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/12/children-of-time-by-adrian-tchaikovsky.html" target="_blank">I've reviewed book one here</a>), our once-competing spider and human civilizations have now teamed up to explore the universe together. We also meet a separate tiny outpost of humans attempting to establish new planetary colonies (readers should avoid emotional investment into any these human pseudoprotagonists however: the author kills them off). And we also meet an oddly interesting uberoctopus civilization, descended from experiments of one of the outpost humans. The octopus civilization offers a sort of neomalthusian lesson as it experiences massive overpopulation, mass violence, environmental collapse--even mass cannibalism. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, there's a still weirder species, and the author struggles a bit in portraying it: a sort of cellular "goo collective" that starts out literally colonizing the minds and bodies of the humans and octopi. Later, by a rather sudden and implausible plot event, the goo befriends all the other species and joins them on an interstellar journey.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">I more or less gave away the ending right there. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">A central theme of this novel is communication across barriers: cultural, civilizational and biological. How would humans possibly communicate with spiders who can't even <i>hear</i> human speech, but rather "speak" via palp-waving, stepping and posturing? And if that communication gap isn't enough, what happens when you try to reach across the mental <i>chasm</i> between you and the octopus species, who communicate by body color and tentacle graspings? It makes you think twice about the communication barriers we needlessly place between ourselves.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This complicated story jumps from time period to time period, requiring periodic reminders and backstory to fill in gaps for the reader. Characters die off, thousands of years pass, wars erupt between and within species... and then the author closes down the story rather arbitrarily, with an abrupt peace, love and understanding arranged for all. This is a competent novel, but less readable and less immersive than its predecessor. We'll see how the author handles book three in a future review. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, <a href="https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1748792537043636544" target="_blank">a link to a striking video of an octopus changing color and texture</a>. Wow!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Peter Godfrey-Smith: <i>Other Minds</i> [a book about octopus intelligence that the author cites in the acknowledgments]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab (I thank this author for yet again offering quite a collection of new words):</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>cnidarian</i>: an aquatic invertebrate animal of the phylum Cnidaria, which comprises the coelenterates</div><div dir="auto"><i>sessile</i>: fixed in one place; immobile (of an organism, e.g. a barnacle)</div><div dir="auto"><i>parthenogenesis</i>: a reproductive strategy that involves development of a female (rarely a male) gamete without fertilization; occurs commonly among lower plants and invertebrate animals (particularly rotifers, aphids, ants, wasps, and bees)</div><div dir="auto"><i>bauplan</i>: generalized structural body plan; the generalized structural body plan that characterizes a group of organisms and especially a major taxon (such as a phylum)</div><div dir="auto"><i>flense</i>: to slice the skin or fat from (a carcass, especially that of a whale); to strip (skin or fat) from a carcass; "the skin had been flensed off"</div><div dir="auto"><i>haruspex</i>: one who performs haruspicy or divination by entrails</div><div dir="auto"><i>urticating</i>: causing a stinging or prickling sensation like that given by a nettle</div><div dir="auto"><i>chelicerae</i>: the pair of appendages in front of the mouth in arachnids and some other arthropods, usually modified as pincer-like claws</div><div dir="auto"></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-82941726958390617152024-01-15T04:55:00.000-08:002024-01-15T04:55:42.429-08:00Walking by Henry David Thoreau [review short]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="ltr">A short ramble of a book. Thoreau's thoughts come and go, tangents form and disappear, just as your own thoughts amble and wander while walking. In fact, <i>Walking</i> makes you want to go for a walk, and during it good ideas will come to you if you let them.[*] </div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Thoreau struggled with modernity even back in 1860s-era Massachusetts. It's the same struggle. There's too much work/spend cycle, too much consumerism, too much development, not enough nature, not enough peace and quiet. But when Thoreau writes <i>"I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant"</i> you can't help but think mournfully about the sheer density, traffic, overdevelopment and all the other problems of modernity in Massachusetts today. "Civilization" continues to domesticate us, gnawing away at our spirits and our souls.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="auto"><div><div dir="ltr">[*] Nietzsche put it much more forcefully: "Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors." I stumbled onto this wonderful quote in <i>Bronze Age Mindset</i>, a book of genuine samizdat literature I'll review shortly.</div><div dir="ltr"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* Etymology of the word <i>sauntering</i>, starting from people in France begging for funds "to go to Sainte-Terre" (the Holy Land) such that children would say "there goes a <i>Sainte-Terrer</i>" which evolved into a <i>saunterer,</i> a Holy-Lander. Likely one of those etymologies that probably isn't true but really feels like it should be. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements..." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* You can't help but get mournful about the immense amount of open space in 1862 Massachusetts compared to now. "I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* See Thoreau's poem (and not a bad one!) "The Old Marlborough Road"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* For whatever reason he always seems to walk southwest, he doesn't know why, "Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free." It sounds like a metaphor for the United States on some level as we chase freedom by moving west. "I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Thoreau on the all-too-temporary idea of American liberty, an increasingly fictional idea even in 1862: "Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* I can't <i>stand</i> the word "methinks"--unfortunately Thoreau uses it every few pages. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Interesting epistemological musings here: on how "a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory" but then this declarative knowledge is like eating hay in a barn, it's not the real knowledge of being out in nature eating grass in the fields. He is scratching at the idea of distinguishing between <i>trying to know something through mental concepts and verbal representations</i> ("...a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before") versus <i>knowing something through direct experience</i>: See also this quote: "A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful--while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with--he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?" </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* A cute little anecdote here where Thoreaus climbs a tall white pine for the first time (and "got well pitched"), discovers "a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine" at the very top of the tree, and brings them into town to show off to total strangers: "not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down." Kind of hilarious if you think about it realistically: Thoreau, a kook woodsman known for living in a shack by the pond, wanders into town showing everybody some little flowers that he picked? You can't help but chuckle happily at this scenelet.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><i>Vespertinal</i>: active in the evening; "vespertine flowers"</div><div dir="auto"><i>Ferity</i>: being feral; the state of being wild or uncultivated; savagery; ferocity</div><div dir="auto"><i>Embayed</i>: formed into bays; hollowed out by the sea; "an embayed coastline"</div><div dir="auto"><i>Musquash</i>: archaic term for muskrat</div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-2899784104478119712024-01-15T04:47:00.000-08:002024-01-15T04:47:24.901-08:00Strange Things Happen by Stewart Copeland<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><i>"My father made sure that I had every kind of proper musical training and technique, but no one was ever able to teach me when to shut up."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">If you've ever watched interviews of Stewart Copeland, the voluble, quotable drummer of the famous 80s band The Police, you see immediately he's a humble, earnest and often hilarious dude. He's an obvious and profound talent on an interesting artistic journey: he seeks variation, change, he dislikes safety. It's fascinating to watch the wide-ranging things he does over the course of his musical career, with little need for popularity and even less fear of failure. A genuinely free artist who never became a prisoner of his success.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">The book has ADHD in the same way Copeland seems to: it is <i>all over the place</i>, bouncing from era to era and from scene to scene in short chapters that nevertheless keep the reader reading. And holy cow what an interesting life he has! His father was a CIA agent, Copeland grew up in Lebanon among other places, and grew into a young American who hardly lived in or knew his own country. He gets involved in all sorts of projects in all sorts of media. He teaches himself how to do film and TV soundtracks and gets really good at it. Heck, the guy even <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@StewartCopelandOfficial" target="_blank">has a Youtube channel</a> now, and it's pretty good!</div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">The book hardly talks about The Police's peak era in the 1980s: there's a couple of short chapters that indirectly deal with grappling with the fame, but Copeland treats it as if everything's already been said about that era and it's not worth much of a revisit. On to the next thing, and don't rest on your laurels: forget your laurels, find new laurels. He spends many more pages discussing the group's 2007 reunion, their struggles to work together, and the quality (or lack thereof at times) of <i>those</i> gigs.</div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">These guys were extremely fortunate: they found fame and wealth at a young age, they let go of their band at its peak, and they used their economic freedom to do what they wanted creatively for decades afterwards. And they quit the game young enough to <i>still</i> do a reunion tour before they were too old. In 2007 Copeland and the other band members were still in their fifties, an age that lets you do most of the things you did when you were young--and a few things even better. You just need a little more rest and recovery in between.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><b>Notes: </b></div></div></div><div dir="auto">* Copeland does his first film score after Francis Ford Coppola's kids recommend him to their father; he has no idea how to do a film score <i>at all</i> and does it in a way no one's done it before. "I don't even realize yet how rare it is to have a director who will give anyone this much rope."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He writes different letters (using different handwriting) to various music magazines about one of his early bands, Curved Air. In each letter he asks things like "who is the exceptional new drummer?" "What's the drummer's name?" etc. Hilarious.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Works as a roadie, a disc jockey, even manages Joan Armatrading back in the day. See below on how his brothers are involved throughout various levels of the music industry stack too: managing, producing, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Note Copeland's experience on the British show "Top of the Pops" and his more or less prank launch of his "band" Klark Kent is an excellent example of how fake everything is in the media--and how it has been for decades. This section of the book reminds me of Ryan Holiday's appalling exposes in <i>Trust Me, I'm Lying</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On being famous: "But living with idolatry is strange, even for those who seek and expect it. You notice the people act oddly in your presence. There is heightened tension. Veins throb in people's foreheads. People laugh nervously, particularly at any gag from the Known One. The tiniest acts of kindness, wisdom, or wit are rewarded with undue enthusiasm..."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* His experience in the polo world is fascinating: he describes this class of people as "feared and despised" by the British middle class, yet to him as an American they seem completely harmless: everybody is extremely vague about their jobs, their money etc. The reader gets the feeling that his experience winning a (somewhat) major polo tournament was more important to him than anything that happened to him as the drummer for The Police. It's pretty interesting to see this: the things you think should matter don't, and the things you think don't matter do.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He gets a commission to write an opera...about the Crusades of all subjects. "Opera generates no income but burns up hours, days, years of creative energy."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Copeland's description of the fundraising events for the Fort Worth Opera are hilarious: observations of the various constructed preferences that exist for the ultra-wealthy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He gets out of practice with drumming and has "Eric Clapton syndrome" where he fears his instrument. He then gets back into it thanks to a jam session with musicians from the band Phish, then starts training for real: biking for physical fitness, and practicing his drums seriously again.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Neat how Copeland's brothers are in the business, managing different artists (one brother managed Sting for many years); they also seem to get along well as brothers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "I like getting calls out of the blue from Sting. We have discovered that we can be good friends--as long as no one mentions music."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He mocks the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, calling at a concert in front of fatcats, the people who handle the business of music: "alpha insect people"; "we go and genuflect for the lawyers."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The music he romanticizes the most is his work with an Italian folk music band where they electrify both the audience and themselves in a performance in Milan. The reader comes away from this chapter with the impression that <i>nothing</i> The Police ever did came close to doing this. Instead, <i>this</i> is the kind of art/music moment you really live for, the kind of performance that fills you with joy and makes you grateful to be alive.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Some funny generational commentary too: Copeland jokes about all the tattoos that bands like Incubus and their roadies have and he considers getting a SpongeBob tattoo over his jugular.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "<i>Porco dio!</i>" I'll have to file this expression away and figure out how to use it in Italy one day. Copeland sure loves to say it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Copeland does a reality TV talent show in England, and we get a good look at all of the phoniness that goes into these shows: the contrived story lines, the "Frankenbiting" of video clips to create drama where there is none, the total artificiality of it all.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He has a debate about Old Testament theology with Gene Simmons (??) while they're both fathers to kids in a select private school. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* He does a movie about his days with The Police, it gets a showing at Sundance, and Sting and Andy Summers show up for the premiere: this becomes the seed of The Police's reunion tour in 2007.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* After forty years of arranging rock bands, Sting is now an expert on everything about drumming and Copeland can't stand it. "Sting and I got along much better when he didn't have any idea of what I should be doing."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Copeland <i>really</i> blows it with the media in South America, where he makes the famous "after four beers" comment about Chile's President Bachelet. Yikes. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The musical conflicts and personality conflicts are interesting and difficult to articulate, although Copeland does his best: Sting is like this baroque artist, he wants it just precisely so, while Copeland is a spaz who loves musical disorder. And yet Copeland still seeks Sting's approval! "Whatever music he [Sting] wants to make, I will definitely buy the record, but I'm the wrong guy to be playing it."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div><b>To Read:</b></div><div>Copeland, Miles: <i>The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative</i></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-51560635671076430652023-12-19T11:19:00.000-08:002023-12-19T11:19:06.899-08:00Best and Worst, 2023 <div style="text-align: left;">I read some fifty books in 2023. These are the ones that stood out, both good and bad, with links to my reviews. Thank you for reading!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Best (5/5 stars or close):</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-origin-of-consciousness-in.html" target="_blank"><i>The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind</i> by Julian Jaynes</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-seven-habits-of-highly-effective.html" target="_blank"><i>The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People</i> by Stephen Covey</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-god-that-failed-ed-richard-crossman.html" target="_blank"><i>The God That Failed</i>, ed. Richard Crossman</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/02/power-failure-by-william-d-cohan.html" target="_blank"><i>Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon</i> by William D. Cohan</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-blocksize-war-by-jonathan-bier.html" target="_blank"><i>The Blocksize War</i> by Jonathan Bier</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/lies-my-government-told-me-by-dr-robert.html" target="_blank"><i>Lies My Government Told Me</i> by Dr. Robert Malone</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/02/limits-to-medicine-medical-nemesis.html" target="_blank"><i>Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health</i> by Ivan Illich</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/j-is-for-junk-economics-by-michael.html" target="_blank"><i>J is for Junk Economics</i> by Michael Hudson</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Worst (1/5 stars or close):</b> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-retirement-myth-by-craig-s-karpel.html" target="_blank"><i>The Retirement Myth</i> by Craig S. Karpel</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-price-of-time-by-edward-chancellor.html" target="_blank"><i>The Price of Time</i> by Edward Chancellor</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/06/this-is-how-you-lose-time-war-by-amal.html" target="_blank"><i>This is How You Lose the Time War</i> by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone</a></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-49367056493269221192023-12-19T11:15:00.000-08:002023-12-20T04:51:10.177-08:00Moonraker by Ian Fleming [review short, notes]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">The novel <i>Moonraker</i> has only the barest resemblance to the mediocre 1979 movie, and as usual, Bond as Fleming conceived him is less perfect and far more interesting. He doesn't even get the girl at the end!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><i>Moonraker</i> is just as readable as <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/live-and-let-die-by-ian-fleming.html" target="_blank">the other two</a> <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/casino-royale-by-ian-fleming.html" target="_blank">Fleming novels</a> I've reviewed. It offers readers a window into a gentleman's era of decorum (and admittedly of classism) that is surely lost in the UK today, and that likely never found much of a foothold at all in the USA. The story also features a classic "villain tells his whole evil plan to the hero and his girl while they're tied up and can't possibly escape" scene that Austin Powers movies have been parodying ever since.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div style="text-align: left;">Something enjoyable happens once you get a few novels deep into a series: you grow to learn the characters' nuances and idiosyncrasies, you see depth and subtlety in their interactions and relationships, and as a reader you get to experience these things at a gradual, more natural pace. An author can't dump a ton of backstory and character nuances onto his readers all at once in one mere novel: it's too much, too soon. You have to have a few Sherlock Holmes under your belt before you can handle finding out Holmes is a cocaine addict, or that he makes astoundingly condescending remarks to Watson without even realizing it. Or for a more modern example, readers warm up to Harry Bosch more and more as they see his odd habits--like absently reaching into his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes that's never there, since he quit smoking years before. Across a series of novels the author can gradually establish these traits in a way that rewards rather than buries the reader. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">One final thought if you'll indulge me. I would have loved to have had the chance to recommend <i>Moonraker</i> to my father just for the bridge game scene early on in the book. My Dad loved bridge: he enthusiastically taught all four of his kids how to play (although none of it really took with any of us), and this part of the novel would have really grabbed him. To most modern readers this scene's pacing will seem all wrong--it's too slow, it feels like nothing's happening, and the very least the reader needs to understand the basics of bridge to follow what's going on. But real bridge players would love it: Bond deals (from a secretly prearranged deck) a very specific set of hands, tempting one opponent to bid aggressively, but yet still enabling Bond to win a grand slam with a very long suit of mostly low clubs. I have a feeling my Dad would have carefully gone over this part of the book, working out in his head precisely how players might bid this hand out, how they might play it out, and what the results would be.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* <i>"Cheats at cards?"</i>: Drax, the villain, is found to be a card cheat, and Bond is both appalled and incredulous. On how doing something in a seemingly small domain gives away <i>everything</i> about your character. <i>"In so-called 'Society', it's about the only crime that can still finish you, whoever you are."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "Now, Miles, what am I to do?" We learn M's real name.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The long, leisurely chapters describing the events at M's card club are interesting: they give a sense of a cultural institution that was already archaic in the 1950s and likely barely exists today.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* On <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Marthe_Richard" target="_blank">Marthe Richard's Law</a>: what a rabbit hole this was! Tying <i>Casino Royale</i> to this novel by mentioning a French law outlawing prostitution in 1946.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Bond takes Benzedrine for the second time in two novels, this time right in front of M, just before his attempt to trap Drax in a bridge game. This whole scene is done quite well, there's a low-grade suspense, but the reader doesn't know exactly why or what's going to happen.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "Bond with a cigarette with hands that it's suddenly become quite steady. His mind was clear. He knew exactly what he had to do, and when, and he was glad that the moment of decision had come." Bond then deals out of a pre-arranged deck with a unique bridge hand where he can win a grand slam with mostly low clubs.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Again we see how Bond is not the Mary Sue character portrayed in the movies: he has vacillatingly inaccurate opinions about Drax, begining with disgust and repulsion when he meets him for the first time, later changing to near-reverence once he sees his Moonraker rocket project, to the point where Bond finds himself making excuses for the man's deeply ungentlemanly behavior earlier on: <i>"Bond followed silently as Drax led the way down the steep iron ladder that curved down the side of the steel wall. He felt a glow of admiration and almost of reverence for this man and his majestic achievement. How could he ever have been put off by Drax's childish behavior at the card table? Even the greatest men have their weaknesses. Drax must need an outlet for the tension of the fantastic responsibility he was carrying."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The Cicero affair, another historical rabbit hole: Cicero was the codename of a Turkish spy who leaked British information to Germany during World War II.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* <i>"Leck mich am Arsch"</i> might be a handy insult to remember one day, you never know.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* <i>"'My real name,' said Drax, addressing himself to Bond, 'is Graf Hugo von der Drache. My mother was English and because of her I was educated in England until I was twelve. Then I could stand this filthy country no longer and I completed my education in Berlin and Leipzig.'"</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* <a href="https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/australian-crime/0/steps/145050" target="_blank">"Lombroso theory"</a> (another rabbit hole!): "Cesare Lombroso argued that criminals could be identified through general characteristics they shared with one another, which he designated as composing a criminal type. His core idea was atavism, which means that he understood criminals to be evolutionary throwbacks who were inferior to non criminals. Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology. He is considered the founder of modern criminal anthropology by changing the Western notions of individual responsibility." Interesting to see which aspects of Lombroso's theory must be accepted and which must be rejected, given the mores of postmodern society.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* <i>"The boy stood on the burning deck. I've wanted to copy him since I was five."</i> Bond makes a cute reference here <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Felicia_Hemans_in_The_Monthly_Magazine_Volume_2_1826/Casabianca" target="_blank">to the poem "Casabianca" by Felicia Hemans</a>, well-known to British schoolchildren of the mid-20th century and before, virtually unknown to American readers of my era and after:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>The boy stood on the burning deck</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Whence all but he had fled;</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The flame that lit the battle's wreck</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Shone round him o'er the dead...</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">John Scarne: <i>Scarne on Cards</i></div><div dir="auto">John Scarne: <i>The Odds Against Me: An Autobiography</i></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-26213047729615496302023-12-11T08:49:00.000-08:002023-12-12T07:46:42.061-08:00The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Then why read it? <i>You</i> don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the <i>worst</i> books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the insights come from contemplating the author's wrongness.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">I'll start with the book's incontinent logic: The author agonizes over the deficits and debt that we're amassing, the utter irresponsibility of it all, warning us solemnly and repeatedly of "the coming collapse" during which the author believes we will face <i>a multi-decade decline</i> in both the stock market <i>and</i> the housing market as the Baby Boomer generation needs to sell all its stuff to make ends meet.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Yet, somehow, barely a few chapters after this prediction, the author later "predicts" Boomers will happily stay in the workforce, "enrich" everyone around them (thanks to all their wisdom and experience) <i>and</i> save more money and fund their lifestyles--as if somehow older workers will have access to all the jobs they want despite this alleged multi-decade collapse. Worse, a few chapters later still, the author gives his recommendations for readers, <i>and they include saving much more money and investing that money into 401k plans</i>. Strange. It's almost like he wrote out these self-contradictory thoughts without any sequential memory, yet there they sit in black and white just a hundred or so pages apart. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Now, if this author, as horrified as he was by the USA's debt and deficits back in 1995, could travel forward in time and see <i>today's</i> debt and deficits in 2023 (or look even more downfield and see Japan's <i>much </i>higher debt and deficits, which is where we're likely headed), he would go back to 1995 and slap himself upside his own head. And go very long US stocks. Thus we as readers can learn that a system can appear unsustainable--and may actually <i>be</i> unsustainable in its current form--but can still endure far longer than doomsayers assume. A train can keep rolling a lot farther than you think it can even though you believe it's on the wrong track.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">This is not to say that there will never be a reckoning for our society's monetary and fiscal irresponsibilities. It's just that this reckoning could be humiliatingly further off than you'd ever imagine. This is why it is much more valuable than it at first appears to read prediction books long after their cycle: we can see what lessons can be drawn from them, what was right, what was way off, which predictions were correct but so early as to be useless, and which were timely so as to be actionable or investable. I'm not saying that I know when this reckoning is going to happen, I have no idea. But even I can see that 1995 was a bit too early to get ready for it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">One final thought. Note that "being humble" (epistemically or otherwise) is not something that you "know" in the sense of semantic or declarative knowledge. It is not that kind of knowledge. Instead, being humble is something you <i>do.</i> It is procedural knowledge. It is a kata and it must be practiced.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>If you're curious to read another example of reading a book outside its period to mine it for insights, <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2011/01/gorilla-game-by-geoffrey-moore.html" target="_blank">take a look at my review of <i>The Gorilla Game</i> by Jeffrey A. Moore</a>, a book that would have <i>destroyed</i> any investor who took its advice at the time it was written.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface: Shelter</b></div><div dir="auto">1) The author tells a short fictional dystopian story of what the (allegedly) coming collapsed society will look like in the year 2014: old people barely making ends meet, being forced to live in bunk beds in a senior shelter, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2) xv "How can it be that after seventy-five years I feel like a stranger in this world?" A fictional old man in a senior shelter with a picture of his dead wife.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Introduction: Dumpies</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>3) "Humans do not get out of the way of that which they cannot see moving."</i></div><div dir="auto">-R. Buckminster Fuller</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4) The word Dumpies is the author's acronym for "destitute unprepared mature people," a renaming of yuppies.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">5) "The deficit is going to be reduced and possibly eliminated. The national debt will no longer spiral upward. But this positive development is going to end retirement as we know it." If this guy could have been teleported to 2023 to see the deficits and national debt that we hold now--or worse to look down the road at Japan to see what's coming next, he would go back and <i>slap</i> his 1995 self, get double-leveraged the US stock market, and get a job as a Cantillon insider.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6) Mass retirement as an idiosyncrasy of American 20th century history, we'll think of it like prohibition or fallout shelters, a product of an era.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">7) The so-called three-legged stool: Social Security, employer pensions, and direct savings. The author says that none of these three is sturdy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">8) Incorrectly predicting cuts in social security before the baby boomers become eligible.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">9) Incorrectly predicting that baby boomers will live longer than any previous generation, by contrast the boomer generation is presiding over the first decline in American life expectancy in history, thanks to obesity, diabetes, suddenly and other iatrogenic harms brought about by an hypermedicalized culture.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10) On avoiding financial myopia</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: 2020 Foresight</b></div><div dir="auto">11) Social Security is not sustainable, action will be taken to bring the system into balance; Social Security and Medicare are 35% of the federal budget (this is 1995, the numbers are much worse now); defense is 24%, and interest on the debt is 14% (again, much worse today).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12) Other concerns the fertility rate dropping, the number of workers compared to the number of retirees getting more and more out of whack <b>[of course this author never realized that we were going to "solve" this problem with mass immigration]</b>; life expectancy going up to all-time highs, etc <b>[note that today, however, life expectancy is "suddenly" experiencing a decline for the first time in USA history].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13) Also noteworthy that the US population in 1995 (when this book came out) was 262 million, about double what it was in 1945, 50 years earlier; now it's something around 330 or 340 million, another 80-ish million more.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">14) The author commits a sort of base rate/denominator error here where he describes that there will be 100 times as many people receiving Social Security in 2045 as in 1945 while the USA's population will have barely tripled. Hardly anybody had actually aged into the system in 1945. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">15) Various trivia and data about Social Security, about Medicare's advisory council as a toothless watchdog organization, the alarming report they put out in 1991 which the author calls the Pentagon Papers of Social Security; on the fictional accounting of the Social Security "trust fund" which doesn't really exist, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>16) [I'm not sure if this author understands that the government can print money to meet any possible obligation.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: The Unkindest Cuts</b></div><div dir="auto">17) The author expects benefits to be cut. "Actuaries agree" <b>[He is thinking in terms of nominal cuts in dollar benefits, when he doesn't realize the actual mechanism will be done through an inflation tax, they will raise the benefits at rates much lower than inflation and print the money to meet the obligation--which will produce future inflation]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">18) Surveys showing how Americans are pessimistic about what benefits they'll actually get from Social Security, they're actually more pessimistic in these surveys per the author "than is called for by the facts."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19) Note the horrible economics of a two-income family because the benefits only go to the highest earner of the two. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">20) Arguing against the notion that the "gray lobby" (older voters) will extract Social Security benefits politically from other generations; the author gives examples of how benefits were cut for disabled workers as well as deductibles raised for Medicare Part B; also reductions of cost of living adjustments to the lower of CPI versus wage growth; some age groups cut off for full benefits, benefits subject to taxation for higher income recipients, etc. [note that all of these are tweaking around the edges of a complicated system but in aggregate, yes, they move the needle]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">21) Various parlor guessing games here on what types of changes will be made to Social Security, changes the benefit formula, means testing, cutting early retirement benefits, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22) <i>"He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state... must at least retain the semblance of the old forms, so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones."</i> --Machiavelli</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23) This chapter could have been reduced to a paragraph.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: The Grand Old Man of Old Age</b></div><div dir="auto">24) About Robert J. Myers, one of the architects of Social Security and a key figure in its rescue in 1983. This is an irrelevant and unnecessary chapter that could also be reduced to a paragraph.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>25) Sixty-five was chosen as an arbitrary number, per Myers: "sixty was too young and seventy was too old. So we split the difference." [Nice to see such a rigorous process for the US government's biggest program! Kind of like how our health care authorities arbitrarily decided "six feet" was the right distance for social distancing.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">26) [The author makes a completely dumb and inaccurate statement here: "When in 1982 the Social Security administration found itself a few months away from bouncing checks to beneficiaries..." <b>Once again the author needs to understand what a fiat currency is and what incredible power comes from seignorage.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27) Social Security as an iterative system where all sorts of things can be tinkered with and changed per Myers. "...the Normal Retirement Age is the system's demographic safety valve."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Pension Tension</b></div><div dir="auto">28) Problems with employer-sponsored pension plans and 401k-type plans; on limited inflation protection of defined benefit plans, adjustments are usually ad hoc, they may not have any inflation adjustment at all, etc. <b>[note that pension plans can inflate their way out of their pension obligations too, just like governments, just measure the adjustments against a fake and low inflation measure like CPI!]</b> On how the US Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation is insolvent [another common doom and zoom statement which is true but not meaningful]; how defined benefit pension plans in some ways are also ponzi-like just like Social Security. A relic of a period of US corporate history while it was insulated from foreign competition. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">29) Standard pros and cons of defined contribution plans: cheaper for the employer, easier to administer, portable; the inflation risk is shifted to the employee; nobody puts any money into them, people don't take enough risk, they don't own enough stocks, myopic loss aversion.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Beyond Saving</b></div><div dir="auto">30) On personal savings not being sufficient; nobody saves money--especially the Baby Boomers. Various tired statistics that show how little Boomers save and how low their net worth is.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: Quantity of Life</b></div><div dir="auto">31) This chapter warns us about life expectancies being too long for the amount of money people have saved for retirement; also warnings on the greater economic resources people will need, especially for nursing homes and so on late in life. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>32) This chapter obviously would have <i>zero</i> idea about the declines in life expectancy that we've started to see over the past few years. This is one of the risks of mindless extrapolation, and the latest life expectancty data sort of kills the entire thesis of this chapter.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">33) Various stats and factoids about aging and the populations age life expectancy, questioning the canonical view that life expectancy will peak at 85 years because of senescent frailty, etc; postulating advances in genetic engineering treating cancer etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">34) On having retirement income that replaces your salary, rather than the 60-80% income replacement rate assumed by financial planners. Obviously this statistic itself ignores your savings rate.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">35) the "sandwich generation" as a concept; Boomers funding both children and aged parents at the same time; a lot of times thinking about this is sort of pointless because it universalizes an individual situation; people face the situation they face and they tend to muddle through, they figure it out.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36) Healthcare costs; that the Medicare age will rise per the author; on long-term care costs, tightening down of trusts and loopholes to keep family assets and get people on Medicaid; on the sticker shock people get from long-term care insurance. <b>[The real solution for a possible long-term care problem remains: if you want to get into a good facility, you <i>still</i> have to have enough money to be able to afford at least few years of it out of your assets: if you can do this you can easily get admitted to the best long-term care facility because they will always prioritize people who can afford to pay list price! If you're already a Medicaid person or if you are going to have to go on Medicaid within a few months, you just have to wait in line.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: How to Survive Geronticide</b></div><div dir="auto">37) This chapter is ironically wrong on a few levels. It discussed the author's expectation that healthcare will have to be "rationed" in the future, the author believes definitively that this is going to happen. <b>[It's interesting how a consensus belief, disbelief was consensus decades ago, turns out to be "not even wrong": if anything we're offering too much health care and it costs people life expectancy because of iatrogenic harms, the irony here is people would live longer and at a higher quality if they consumed less health care</b>.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38) Predictions here are all wrong: that joint replacement procedures would fall, that medical care would be rationed in any way, etc.; if anything the opposite is happening,</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">39) The author does make a good point here mocking the healthcare rationing crowd by asking "why not just strangle everyone at birth and save the entire gross national product?" This is a good example of a <i>reductio ad absurdum</i> argument right here.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">40) This guy is early to recognize a lot of the medical tourism even back as early as 1995. "There are going to be state-of-the-art, American-staffed mega-hospitals with campus-like grounds in cities like Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Hermosillo, Juarez, Monterey, and Nuevo Laredo, serving not only the West Coast, the Southwest, and Texas by road, but points north by air. They won't be comparable to US facilities: they'll be better, because they won't have their hands tied by inappropriately dubbed 'global budgets,' which will be, ironically, not global but national."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: The Great Depreciation</b></div><div dir="auto">41) This chapter offers a standard bear/doom argument from the 1980s and 1990s: because Boomers are going to sell all their stocks to pay for everything, stock and asset prices are going to all crash and we'll have a "devastating economic slump." <b>[Again, this is a "not even wrong" type prediction: first of all, it's a first order prediction that ignores people taking action with it in mind: obvious demographic changes are usually already implicit in stock/asset prices. The other irony of this argument is that such a selloff would be <i>great</i> thing because then the rest of us can buy these assets at lower valuations!! It's a non-argument on every level. And gain turned out to be "not even wrong" because assets prices, stock prices, housing prices, etc., in the United States are all higher than ever.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">42) The author hilariously claims "How long to stay out of stocks and bonds? Oh, a few decades or so ought to do it" claiming that the coast still won't be clear until 2065. [!!!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43) This author is making tremendous category errors on a few dimensions; first markets tend to anticipate things like this well in advance; second, there has to be a seller for every buyer, and population growth and demographics tend not to have the kind of impact on stock markets that everybody expects; often the results are less obvious or less than what people expect (and in any case we have to be humble about very obvious first-order consequences of things like these); finally if there is a tremendous crash in stock prices, believe me I'll be in there buying with both hands, and probably I won't be alone in doing so.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">44) Note also that set of assumptions when applied to home prices is equally "not even wrong": home prices have done the exact opposite of collapse despite the fact that we're now well into the 2020s when a collapse should have already started according to this author.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>45) Arguments of this genre may seem plausible on a naive level, but once you think through that there's two people on the side of every trade it stops making so much sense.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46) One of the recommendations here is to "sell your assets before everyone else does" </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>47) Remember, this book was written in 1995: think about how helpful this advice would be for readers in those days. The exercise of thinking about things like this will teach you epistemic humility about all predictions <i>all the time</i>.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">48) The housing price predictions are even more hilarious than wrong: the author expects a tremendous decline in housing prices across the decades after 1995. Decline of 37% in housing prices between 1995 and 2010; elsewhere predictions of home prices falling by more than 50%.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto">49) It's also rather weird to hear this author lecture readers on saving more money for their retirement and in their 401K plans, and then a couple of chapters later warn us that the stock market and the housing market are going to crash for decades to come. This is incontinent.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: Longevity Insurance</b></div><div dir="auto">50) The author argues here that we need "the opportunity to continue to work into our sixties, seventies, and even later if necessary." Working as a fourth leg of the so-called three-legged retirement stool of Social Security, pensions and personal savings.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">51) On "productive aging": My wife often takes note of who among her patients "age well" and stay sharp and active late in life: you have to be both lucky but also take good care of the luck you get by staying active, working, working out, engaging your mind, eating well, de-medicating yourself, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">52) All kinds of examples of old people who continue to work at late ages, from Mike Wallace to Jessica Tandy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: Postmodern Maturity</b></div><div dir="auto">53) The AARP now supporting graying <i>workers,</i> contrary to its name. This chapter is insight-free and should have been cut.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Role Reversal</b></div><div dir="auto">54) Another weak, forgettable and non-predictive chapter: the author believes that ageism in in the workplace will be a thing of the past. The big part of his argument is that strength and speed are not as necessary for the labor force as they used to be, which is technically true. [<b>But the real liability of older workers typically is neuroplasticity (in the ability to quickly learn things). But more importantly, you have to game theory out the labor market to really think through this problem: the benefit of younger workers (from the employers' standpoint) is obedience, a lack of independence and the need for income that typically is more true for younger workers than for older, more financially independent workers. Employers want dependence and compliance in employees more than they want wisdom.]</b><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: The Wisdom Economy</b></div><div dir="auto">55) On the idea that older workers would make better knowledge workers ("wisdom workers"); that the Baby Boom generation will stay connected and relevant by remaining in the labor force; that they'll be like some kind of tribal elder.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">56) There is one cute quote here on page 157: <i>"I don't know if it's true that old dogs can't learn new tricks. But I'm sure about one thing: old dog trainers can teach young dog trainers how to train young dogs."</i> It's cute... except once you think about it you realize it's rather harshly condescending once you think about who, exactly, are the "young dogs" referred to. <b>Thus this quote becomes sort of a nutshell indicator of the narcissism and arrogance of the Boomer generation in the eyes of Millennials and Gen Z for example.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: Florida Shock</b></div><div dir="auto">57) Various examples of older Floridians still working for various reasons, Florida as an example of an older population with lots of old people still holding down jobs. Various justifications for work: to get out of the house, to stop sitting around, etc. The author's point here is that what is happening now in 1995 will happen more and more as Boomers age. Strange and overly long tangent here about the Home Shopping Network and older workers staffing their call centers.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Independent Means</b></div><div dir="auto">58) This chapter lectures readers on how they're going to need to be self-reliant; they're supposed to develop new competencies; they'll need to develop personal entrepreneurship; they'll need to make ultra long-term investments... [despite the fact that stock market and housing prices are supposed to enter a long term collapse?]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59) Useful notions here on the difference between "specific human capital" (work knowledge that is specific to a particular firm) and "general human capital" (industry knowledge that you can take with you to another job). <b>[The author doesn't address this but this insight goes to the hyperspecialization of labor in the modern era, and how the more hyperspecialized your knowledge is the more dependent on your employer you tend to be.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60) The investment themes here are terrible. Invest in nursing homes because lots and lots of old people? Invest in emerging markets when inflation and the author's alleged coming collapse would wreck them even more than here? These are anti-ideas. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 15: Pressing On All the Buttons</b></div><div dir="auto">61) The organization the author created, "Future Elders of America (FEA), does not seem to have survived very long.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">62) Pressing "all the buttons" of policy ideas: the author gives a lot of suggestions here (that he thinks should "all" be done): from encouraging shared housing for elder people, to "ask your employer to make emerging markets mutual funds an option in their 401k plan" to "each of us has to face up to any negative feelings we may have toward older people and deal with them."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 16: Owl Mountain</b></div><div dir="auto">63) "From the beginning of time, societies have called older people to continue to contribute to the life of the community. The first stirrings of a new, intergenerational aging movement, in which younger people help empower older people, while older people convey their wisdom to younger people, are being felt. It's essential that members of the baby boom generation begin now to become involved in this effort, so that by the time they're older, there will be a widespread appreciation of the importance of enabling elders to contribute--in the form of paid work, if they need it--far into later life." Also: "When the aging movement attains critical mass it will release as much cultural energy as any previous coming-together of the baby boom generation, if not more." <b>[I give the author credit for his optimism and credulousness and hope for these things too, but if anything the exact opposite of these quotes seems to be happening: the generations behind the Boomers don't want any of their wisdom, they want them to go away.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b> </div><div dir="auto">R. Buckminster Fuller: <i>Critical Path</i></div><div dir="auto">Phillip Longman: <i>Born to Pay</i></div><div dir="auto">Robert N Butler, MD: <i>Why Survive?</i></div><div dir="auto">Charles Handy: <i>The Age of Paradox</i></div><div dir="auto">Charles Handy: <i>The Age of Unreason</i></div><div dir="auto">Peter Drucker: <i>The Age of Discontinuity</i></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-77490160681897593842023-12-06T03:41:00.000-08:002023-12-12T12:07:28.061-08:00Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">Readable! A sci-fi/fantasy hybrid novel with plenty of world-building, using the standard narrative technique of alternating two story threads that unify at the finale. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">An Earth ship deposits an "uplift nanovirus" on a planet, accelerating evolution there, and this inadvertently causes a species of spiders to develop a sophisticated civilization. That's one of the story threads. The other thread follows a group of humans on a multigenerational sleep-ship, seeking a new home after fleeing an uninhabitable, post-collapse Earth. </div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">One warning. Do not read this book if you are grossed out by spiders. Or do! There's a well-executed mild horror movie vibe throughout.</div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"></div></div><div dir="auto">The story gets you thinking about the stages of development of cognition and the implications of sentience (a coincidental tie-in to <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-origin-of-consciousness-in.html" target="_blank">Julian Jaynes' wonderful book <i>The Bicameral Mind</i></a>). As the spiders evolve into the dominant species on their planet, they learn a sort of agriculture and animal husbandry, they "employ" (enslave really) various ant species on their planet as Helots, they develop religion with orthodoxies and heresies, they even have a sort of men's rights movement as male spiders fight for equality under a female-dominated species. The author is quite creative with his ideas and it rings plausible to the reader. And as this civilization <i>builds</i> its history and legends, there's an anti-parallel in the human story thread: they've <i>devolved</i> civilizationally, losing much of the expertise, technology, even the language of their pre-collapse ancients.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">This book is not the same caliber as Cixin Liu's <i>Three Body Problem</i>. But it is <i>far</i> better than the last sci-fi novel I read, Andy Weir's <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/10/project-hail-mary-by-andy-weir.html" target="_blank">readable but forgettable <i>Project Hail Mary</i></a>.</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* I can't help but think of this book as sci-fi meets <i>The Selfish Gene</i>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The idea of encoded/instinctive knowledge vs. learned knowledge: as these accelerated species develop self-awareness, they struggle to figure out ways to pass on learned knowledge.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* This spider civilization is (massively) female dominant: a female can kill a male at any time for any reason, and males are eaten alive after copulation. Eventually however, the spider culture develops a sort of men's rights movement: one of the spiders becomes sort of a male Elizabeth Cady Stanton, advocating for male spider rights. It's a cute conceit running alongside the main story. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The ant civilization on this "accelerated evolution" planet at first acts like a gigantic siafu, devouring everything in its path across entire continents.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The humans here are descended from far more advanced ancient, pre-collapse humans; human beings of the future are hypocognizant, they hardly understand anything about the technology the ancients used, they have to use a "classicist" to read old Earth tech manuals, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Some of the dialogue is Scalzi-esque: trendy language not appropriate for an operatic novel.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* A too easy ending? "The two peoples of the green world work together in easy harmony now."</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab:</b></div><div dir="auto"><i>Abseil</i>: rappel; descend a rock face or other near-vertical surface by using a doubled rope coiled round the body and fixed at a higher point</div><div dir="auto"><i>Conurbation</i>: an extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities</div><div dir="auto"><i>Chivvying</i>: tell (someone) repeatedly to do something</div><div dir="auto"><i>Oubliette</i>: a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling</div><div dir="auto"><i>Seraglio</i>: women's harem in an Ottoman palace.</div><div dir="auto"><i>Lazar house</i>: hospital for persons with infectious diseases (especially leprosy) </div><div dir="auto"><i>Counterpane</i>: bedspread</div><div dir="auto"><i>Idiolectic</i>: the dialect of an individual person at one time. This term implies an awareness that no two persons speak in exactly the same way and that each person's dialect is constantly undergoing change--e.g., by the introduction of newly acquired words</div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-88806656148907010812023-12-05T17:31:00.000-08:002023-12-07T14:38:24.890-08:00Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Recommended for literature geeks only. And I mean <i>real</i> literature geeks. It will help enormously to have some background in English poetry and literature to follow along as the author explains how to use ambiguity to produce various effects in writing.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">William Empson has a wonderful gift for articulating all the unspoken feelings, images and notions that pass through our minds as we read good poetry or prose. He puts words to things that I would have thought impossible to describe, like how a feeling creeps over you as you read certain lines of poetry, even though you may not know why or what it was precisely that created that feeling. He explains techniques of communication and rhetoric with great facility, even describing techniques that in fact fail if the reader perceives them while reading!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">You will learn about several excellent minor poets (see for example Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, Richard Lovelace, Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others) as well as learn minor works of the great poets (a couple of examples that at least in my case my education overlooked: Milton's <i>Lycidas</i> and John Donne's <i>A Validiction, of Weeping</i>). There's an excellent review of many passages in several Shakespeare plays, and an interesting analysis of several of Shakespeare's sonnets. I read the <i>Sonnets</i> in undergrad, but like many young people found them difficult and unapproachable, works that simply did not resonate with me at that stage of life. As I grow older I find I appreciate them much, much more.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is a book from (and for) a more hypercognizant age. One bows reverently to this author's absolute mastery of the English literary tradition, and yet he somehow managed to write a book both humble and self-effacing at the same time it is dense and technical.</div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">[PS: <a href="https://ia601901.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/2015.215758.Seven-Types.pdf" target="_blank">You can find a free online copy of this book here</a>.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8b2LTJYj2MBe3oltRmwfl_Y0c07D2WAG1Hh1pgK40Lu1xHBDYFsKQQG5xkhK13tAOdap2_PpRwSysA02udCQQDYapn1S1s5HJjVVoAgbevXnmsUxD7dGXXNOKtcx2_DwynaAkd3sNZJbJSvqJHDtCbErDJE7aO7w1ODH5GpNxuftDyUK5KgDbqEcHriyx/s4096/IMG_20230925_140310573.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="3072" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8b2LTJYj2MBe3oltRmwfl_Y0c07D2WAG1Hh1pgK40Lu1xHBDYFsKQQG5xkhK13tAOdap2_PpRwSysA02udCQQDYapn1S1s5HJjVVoAgbevXnmsUxD7dGXXNOKtcx2_DwynaAkd3sNZJbJSvqJHDtCbErDJE7aO7w1ODH5GpNxuftDyUK5KgDbqEcHriyx/w480-h640/IMG_20230925_140310573.jpg" width="480" /></a></div></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA4Wnu7W24HsDmlyUkAb4cLzXMKcGQuv3MPNkm8SNWLxH6BJ81L1bHbHAYAlHgDgYkO913mVlyWet3LNpWDE7FTcLev92uKy-L8Uvtb_waopVHHUC-KKot9LZMJ0t7veQ00EO_neYWgBlW9gx96rUtRzhKfENchPuZIV8PqI5ywIJ4p2Gk6HggaDDeG2lY/s4096/IMG_20230925_140320867.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="3072" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA4Wnu7W24HsDmlyUkAb4cLzXMKcGQuv3MPNkm8SNWLxH6BJ81L1bHbHAYAlHgDgYkO913mVlyWet3LNpWDE7FTcLev92uKy-L8Uvtb_waopVHHUC-KKot9LZMJ0t7veQ00EO_neYWgBlW9gx96rUtRzhKfENchPuZIV8PqI5ywIJ4p2Gk6HggaDDeG2lY/w480-h640/IMG_20230925_140320867.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><b><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface to the Second Edition</b></div><div dir="auto">vii "Sir Max Beerbohm has a fine reflection on revising one of his early works; he said he tried to remember how angry he would have been when he wrote it if an elderly pedant had made corrections, and how certain he would have felt that the man was wrong."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xiv "One of the best known short poems by Blake is actually crossed out by the author in the notebook which is the only source of it." <b>[On the idea that authors--even great authors--can't judge their own works, likewise critics don't know necessarily which works are great or not; and further that later readers often see in a poem much more than the author himself put there.]</b> Also an interesting example here of the painter John Constable and painting studies that he had done: his unfinished or preliminary works were seen by the critical establishment as tremendously important and much better than his actual finished works! "The point I am trying to make is that this final 'judgment' is a thing which must be indefinitely postponed."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1 </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[First-type ambiguities arise when a detail is affected in several ways at once]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">1 "An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">2-3 "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" from the Sonnets, with the ambiguity of a variety of references, ruin, monastery, it used to have a human choir but now it's where birds sit, the church is destroyed for various historical reasons, all of these ambiguities combine and the reader may not actually know <i>which</i> ambiguity precisely is at play, but they "all combine to give the line its beauty"... "the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">3 On the nuances behind the phrase "this poet will mean more to you when you have had more experience of life" <b>[this is the sort of thing a college professor will tell a young student for example: and a student like me would roll his eyes, but then twenty years later recognize my professor was right all along...]</b> It goes to having more information, more experience, more understanding of verbal subtleties, and growing into the type of person who can extract experience from what is described in poetry. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">8 Confronting two fundamental objections: 1) that the meaning of poetry does not matter because it is apprehended as Pure Sound, and 2) that what really matters about poetry is the Atmosphere. Pure sound is the oddity of the way poetry acts, lines seem beautiful without reason and people can decide if a poem deserves further attention just by glancing at it; the author makes a hilarious quote here about practitioners of Pure Sound who read passages from Homer to infants "not unlike Darwin playing the trombone to his French beans." (!!!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10-11 <i>"Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore"</i> (Aeneid, VI) "and they stretched out their hands in yearning for the other shore" [regarding souls of the unburied waiting to cross the river to the afterworld]. The author here is using an example where you have to know a lot about the phrase before you can understand the impact of the sentence's sound (that there's assonance, the last two words connect in a sorrowful sense hinting at a long wait, etc), <b>thereby disproving the Pure Sound idea</b>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12-13 On synesthesia: "apprehension in terms of one of the senses is described in terms of, or compared with, one of the others." On mezcal (as well as migraine and epileptic states) helping people transition between senses, how they think they're seeing something delightful... if they could just make out what it was.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16 On the concept of atmosphere: that a poetic effect conveys some physical intimate quality, sensation not attached to any one sense; atmosphere "conveyed in some unknown and fundamental way as a by-product of meaning."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>17 "In wishing to apply verbal analysis to poetry the position of the critic is like that of the scientist wishing to apply determinism to the world."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">18 An example from Macbeth (Act 3, scene 2, lines 50ff) "where an affective state is conveyed particularly vividly by devices of particular irrelevance."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">21 "This introduction is grown too long and too portentous; it is time I settled down to the little I can do in this chapter..."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22 On false antithesis, placing words as if in opposition but without saying in what way they're opposed. Showing a "trivial" example of this in Peacock's <i>War Song</i> where <i>heroes</i> and <i>cravens</i> and <i>spearmen</i> and <i>bowmen</i> are listed in successive lines as categories of the dead but without a distinction, since they're all dead; a type of "failure of the antithesis":</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>The eagles and the ravens</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>We glutted with our foemen;</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The heroes and the cravens, </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The spearmen and the bowmen.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22-3 See also the example from Pope's poem <i>Unfortunate Lady,</i> with an antithesis of high versus low birth that sits in the reader's mind in sort of an unclear or inchoate way, "what is important about such devices is that they leave it to the reader vaguely to invent something, and make him leave it at the back of his mind."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23-25 Another technique: using a comparative adjective but without a specified noun to be compared with, the "general form" of ambiguity:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Swiftly the years, beyond recall.</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Solemn the stillness of this spring morning.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Note the contrast between <i>swiftly</i> and <i>stillness</i> which produces ambiguity as the words "put two time-scales into the reader's mind in a single act of apprehension... two statements are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relations for himself."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">25 Using metaphors which are recognized as metaphors but also can be received simply "as words in their acquired sense." An example from Nash's poem <i>Summer's Last Will and Testament</i>:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Beauty is but a flower</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Which wrinkles will devour.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is a reference to time as the thing that devours or eats literally everything, gluttonously, hence the Latin phrase <i>edax rerum</i>, while on a superficial level this is sort of a mixed metaphor. Other examples in this stands of poetry for example <i>Brightness falls from the air</i> and <i>Dust hath closed Helen's eye</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27 Using a word selected as a vivid detail as particular for general: the word "alas" in a stanza from Ben Johnson's <i>Pan's Anniversary</i>, which can refer to multiple subjects: <i>sheep</i> due to proximity, <i>grass</i> by rhyme, and <i>shepherds</i> (also by proximity), bringing out a range of implications. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Pan is our All, by him we breathe, we live,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>We move, we are;...</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>But when he frowns, the sheep, alas,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The shepherds wither, and the grass.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">30 Other aspects of poetry that differentiate it from prose: for example meter, rhyme and rhythm, which allow the writer to convey a statement with non-colloquial syntax, to reorder words and produce different and more elaborate implications and ambiguities.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">30ff Extended discussion on rhythm and it many uses and roles in creating ambiguity: how the pace of a line can make it seem exhilarating, a slower pace can demand sympathy or even produce a funereal tone; examples from Marlow's <i>Tamburlane</i> as well as Marlow's <i>Dr. Faustus</i>; see also Spencer and <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, the specific stanza metric structure he uses (ababbcbcc) can produce a wide range of patterns and emotional states [I remember some this analysis of structure from my English literature undergraduate days!] The first four lines are a simple quatrain, but then the repeated "b" line can do a few different things: it can surprise the reader, emphasize something, add an afterthought, etc; the second quatrain then ends with a "c" couplet which also can do different things, etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">34ff On ambiguities in <a href="https://homepages.uc.edu/~druryjp/Sidney,%20A%20Double%20Sestina.htm" target="_blank">Sir Phillip Sydney's work <i>Ye Goatherd Gods</i></a> from <i>The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia</i>; on the monotony and repetition of words like mountains, valleys, forests, music, evening, morning, "with something of the aimless multitudinousness of the sea on a rock"; [!] on the various ambiguous meanings of these words: mountains can be "haunts of Pan for lust and Diana for chastity" and valleys "hold nymphs to which you may appeal, and yet are the normal places where you live" and so on; see also the deliberate misprint of the word <i>mourning</i> in the line <i>"Who where she went bore in her forehead mourning"</i> in the second-to-last stanza, which completes the sort of crescendo in the poem itself, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38 Also note the value of specific form limitations: how it can free up tremendous feeling, emotion and other effects. "And limited as this form may be, the capacity to accept a limitation so unflinchingly, the capacity to even conceive so large a form as a unit of sustained feeling, is one that has been lost since that age." <b>[Notice that modern poetry typically doesn't have any form or formalized structure at all, it's almost like we've become unable to handle the demands of traditional English poetical structures (like the sonnet form, but also even metric structures like iambic pentameter, etc.) as our culture becomes more and more hypocognizant.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">38ff Dramatic irony: referring back to the example from Macbeth on page 18, also an example from <i>Deirdre of the Sorrows</i> by John Millington Synge (Irish playwright); on the play's backdrop of a tremendous storm; how the storm unifies the drama, creates an urgency, it also shows, ironically, the impotence of heroic action, and that all the troubles which are forecast to the main character have been foretold and are beyond her control, that you're exercising your will pointlessly "against a fatal and frankly alien heaven."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">40 Again on the pathetic fallacy, where we commit the fallacy of ascribing pathos to inanimate objects (like nature for example): this is a type of ambiguity imposed upon the reader and it causes great "emotional reverberation."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">43ff Examples of subdued irony; Portia's conceit about lead and coffins in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>; also Menenius' strange speech about gangrene and what to do about it in <i>Coriolanus</i>; see also the <i>Iliad</i> where Helen has sorrow for bringing about the death of so many brave men, but then also pride in making tapestries of them. See also the quote "nothing will come of nothing" and "nothing can be made out of nothing" lines said by King Lear some 600 lines apart, first to Cordelia and another time to the Fool. Note that Shakespeare wrote plays already owned by his company and the actors already knew a great deal about them, thus these unusual verbal ironies separated by hundreds of lines of text might help actors from becoming bored with the play as they performed over and over again.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2 </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>["In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48 Three scales or dimensions "along which ambiguities may be spread out" </div><div dir="auto">* The degree of logical or grammatical disorder</div><div dir="auto">* The degree to which the apprehension of the ambiguity must be conscious</div><div dir="auto">* The degree of psychological complexity concerned</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">48 "An example of a second type of ambiguity, in word or syntax, occurs when two or more meanings are resolved into one."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49 "It is impossible to avoid Shakespeare in these matters; partly because his use of language is of unparalleled richness and partly because it has received so much attention already; so that the inquiring student has less to do, is more likely to find what he is looking for, and has evidence that he is not spinning fancies out of his own mind."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">49ff Examples from <i>Macbeth</i>, also Sonnets 93, 95 as well as Sonnets 32 and 13. <b>Note how phrases or portions of given lines can refer to either the sentence before or after it, as yet another aspect of the ambiguity.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">52 "Sometimes the ambiguous phrase is a relative clause, with 'that' omitted, which is able to appear for a moment as an independent sentence on its own, before it is fitted into the grammar." See Sonnet 31:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Their images I lov'd, I view in thee, </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54-57 See Sonnet 16, featuring the phrase "lines of life" with a wide range of ambiguous meanings, everything from your personal appearance, time's wrinkles on one's face, one's line or lineage or descendants, lines drawn with a pencil or pen or in writing, or the lines of a poem, or one's destiny as in lifelines in palmistry; thus leading to a bunch of different possible interpretations of what this poem actually means. "Ambiguities of this sort may be divided into those which, once understood, remain an intelligible unit in the mind; those in which the pleasure belongs to the act of working out and understanding, which must at each reading, though with less labour, be repeated; <b>and those in which the ambiguity works best if it is never discovered.</b> Which class any particular poem belongs to depends in part on your own mental habits and critical opinions, and I am afraid that for many readers who have the patience to follow out this last analysis, it will merely spoil what they had taken for a beautiful Sonnet by showing it to be much more muddled than they had realized." [!!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">59ff Looking at several quite striking and beautiful ambiguities in passages of Chaucer's <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">68ff Moving to 18th century poets (who, per the author, would have liked to have thought there was no ambiguity in their poems and would be "horrified" that there were); the author tackles a stanza of <i>The Vanity of Human Wishes</i> by Samuel Johnson, and shows all kinds of examples of ambiguous words and clauses.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">70ff On "zeugma" and double meanings (see below for definition, but an example here would be "John and his license expired last week"). "Of course, the zeugma is not an eighteenth-century invention, but it was not handled before then with such neatness and consciousness, and had not the same air of being the normal process of thought." Showing various examples from Pope here. Some of these are wittier than others...</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76 Examples from <i>Absalom and Achitophel</i> by John Dryden, where words can either be verbs or participles: see sway'd, dissembl'd and delay'd in:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Thus long have I by Native Mercy sway'd,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>My Wrongs dissembl'd, my Revenge delay'd;</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>So willing to forgive th' Offending Age;</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>So much the Father did the King assuage.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"The heroic couplet in any case depends very much on participles for its compactness, so that an opportunity for this device often turns up."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77ff A whole ton of good examples of verbs/participle ambiguity from T.S. Eliot's <i>The Wasteland</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">79 Ambiguity because a line of poetry can go forward or backward, a line can refer to the line before or to the line after. See T.S. Eliot's poem <i>Whispers of Immortality</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">80ff Returning to Shakespeare: on debates about what words mean or what interpretations are acceptable or not; see the footnote in Arden's <i>Shakespeare Complete Works</i> on the word "rookie/rooky" as used in <i>Macbeth</i>. On the idea here that you can believe in a great many of alternative meanings at once; on emendations and corrections to Shakespeare, particularly those from the 18th century to clean up the text and restore it to "shipshape condition" were done because in Shakespeare's era, there were many misspellings or "non-stable" spellings, which came with different interpretations based on the spelling choices; see (mis)spellings in light of "Shakespeare's known sensibility for puns."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>83: The author notes the Elizabethan tendency to mind "very little about spelling and punctuation," giving readers the need to grope for the right word, and "that only our snobbish oddity of spelling imposes on us the notion that one mechanical word, to be snapped up by the eye, must have been intended."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">88ff On the use of "and" and "of" in ambiguity, see for example from <i>King Lear</i>:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"Blasts and fogs upon thee. </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The untented woundings of a father's curse. </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Pierce every sense about thee."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Note here the "wounds" may be a cause or effect of a curse, the curse might be uttered against the father or could be a curse on the father that is visited on his child, etc.</div><div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto">90ff A common Shakespearean linguistic form: "'the (noun) and (noun) of (noun)'; in which two, often apparently quite different, words are flung together, followed by a word which seems to be intended to qualify both of them."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"...were 't to renounce his Baptisme,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>All Seales, and Symbols of redeemed sin:"</i></div><div dir="auto">(<i>Othello</i>, II. iii. 356)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"...since this form demands that the reader should find a highest common factor of its first two nouns, it implies that he must open his mind to all their associations, so that the common factor may be as high as possible. That is, it is a powerful means of forcing him to adopt a poetical attitude towards."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">91 See also here an interesting example from <i>Hamlet</i> Act 3, scene 3: "Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults" where Shakespeare gives us very little context here. "All we are given is two parts of the body and the Day of Judgment" as the author describes the context of the passage, which leaves the reader to do all sorts of imaginative work.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">94 The author notes that Shakespeare uses this form so often that it's been drummed into our ears until we hardly notice it ("the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune," "the whips and scorns of time," etc), and yet "the form is rare before Shakespeare, and even in Shakespeare before <i>Hamlet</i>."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>95-6 An example from the play <i>All's Well That Ends Well</i> that is a repeat of a synonym, but not <i>quite</i> a synonym once you think about it using this "and and of" format: </b></div><div dir="auto"><i><b><br /></b></i></div><div dir="auto"><b><i>"Th' inaudible, and noiseless foot of time..."</i> </b></div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Note that one word is Latinate, the other is Anglo-Saxon: the "slight difference" in meanings illustrates the many ways time's foot can be noiseless, but also soundless; it's a brooding and melancholy line and the implication of the difference between these two synonyms is in the background; also note the interesting footnote here where the author talks about how synonyms are used in legal documents in case there's a claim later that there's a difference in meaning--this is done to make sure that both Norman and Saxon groups understood the meanings in the contract. (!!!)</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">96ff After using synonyms in this "and-and-of" format you can also use oxymorons or tautology in this structure to produce ambiguity of different forms, see examples from <i>Hamlet</i>, from <i>I Henry IV</i>, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">99 Good example here of ambiguity conveying a variety of feelings: </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"When I consider</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>What great creation, and what dole of honor</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Flies where you bid it..." </i></div><div dir="auto">(<i>All's Well That Ends Well</i>, II. iii. 170)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Note the reading "c<i>reation of honor"</i> versus "<i>dole of honor,"</i> which combines the meaning of "doling out" and the idea of "doleful," thus yielding two possible interpretation here: that "you make and break people according to your liking" or that "the honor you give people weighs them down."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">101 An example from <i>Macbeth</i> of an imposed spectrum of meanings:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"But cruel are the Times, when we are Traitors</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>And do not know ourselves; when we hold Rumour</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>From what we feare, yet no not what we feare,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>But float upon a wilde and violent Sea </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Each way, and move."</i></div><div dir="auto">(M<i>acbeth</i>, IV. ii. 18)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"He has described, as one living through such a time, its blind agitation and disorder, and then, calmed by the effort of description, gazes out over the <i>Sea</i> with a hushed and equable understanding; so that the whole description is called back into the mind, remembered as in stillness or as from a distance, by the last word. <i>And</i> here is being used, as so often, to connect two different ways of saying, two different attempts at saying, the same thing; but in this case one way takes over four lines of packed intensity and elaborate suggestion; the other takes one word, perhaps the flattest, most general, and least coloured in the English language. <b>I am glad to close this chapter with so rich an example of an imposed wealth of meaning."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Ambiguity of the third type: "when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">102 Samson referring to Delilah as "That specious monster, my accomplished snare."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104ff Some of these examples are types of puns, some noticed by the reader right away, some not noticed except contextually; see the puns from Milton which have a certain "dignity" to them per the author, partly because they're derived "with an air of learning and command of language": see Milton's line about Elijah's ravens: <i>"Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">106 Interesting comment here about the history of the English language, referring to the poetry of Marvell. <b>"It is partly this tact which makes Marvell's puns charming and not detached from his poetry; partly something more impalpable, that he manages to feel Elizabethan about them, to imply that it was quite easy to produce puns and one need not worry about one's dignity in the matter. It became harder as the language was tidied up, and one's dignity was more seriously engaged. For the Elizabethans were quite prepared, for instance, to make a pun by a mispronunciation, would treat puns as mere casual bricks, requiring no great refinement, of which any number could easily be collected for a flirtation or indignant harangue.</b> By the time English had become anxious to be 'correct' the great thing about a pun was that it was not a Bad Pun, that it satisfied the Unities and what not; it could stand alone and would expect admiration, and was a much more elegant affair."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>107 "I shall now list four eighteenth century puns, in order of increasing self-consciousness."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">109 "The nineteenth-century punster is quite another thing; to begin with he is not rude." The author goes through some of the works of Thomas Hood and has rather faint praise for it. An "airlessness to the humor."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">111 Amusing reference here where the author quotes a poem by Hood while citing a place where "Shakespeare would have extracted a pun on 'kine'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">111ff On word associations that work and are used in the same way as puns, also used much more often. An example could be an allegory that may have many levels of interpretation: see for example a passage in <i>Henry V</i> (I. ii. 320) where Shakespeare compares men to bees, but also uses other interlocking allegories like bees humming in activity, "singing masons building roofs of gold," etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">121 "With some violence both to language and sense" a great phraselet from Samuel Johnson, criticizing a poem by Thomas Gray.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">125ff Third-type ambiguities which talk about one thing, then imply several ways of judging or feeling about that thing. From Pope's <i>Epistle to Arbuthnot</i>:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"...who, high in Drury Lane,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Lulled by soft zephyrs through the broken pane,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Rhymes e'er he wakes, and prints before term ends,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Obliged by hunger, and request of friends."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">This is both mocking and sympathetic to a poet who is essentially starving, probably isn't that talented, etc., the reader can't "be sure what proportions are intended" of these contradictory feelings Pope has toward the starving poet.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Ambiguity of the fourth type: "when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">133 "An ambiguity of the fourth type occurs when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author. Evidently this is a vague enough definition which would cover much of the third type, and almost everything in the types which follow; I shall only consider here its difference from the third type."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">134ff The author uses the example of Shakespeare's Sonnet 83, a "noble compound of eulogy and apology." See the first quatrain:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>I never saw that you did painting need, </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>And therefore to your fair no painting set; </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>I found, or thought I found, you did exceed </i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The barren tender of a poet's debt:</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"> Note here that by putting a comma after the word <i>therefore</i> in line 2, and removing a likely misprint comma at the end of <i>exceed</i> in line 3, the poem's meaning changes quite subtly. He goes on to show several other examples here: the word <i>tender</i> in line 4, the phrase <i>poet's debt</i> in line four, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">137ff See also Sonnet 17:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"Who will believe my verse in time to come</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>If it were filled with your most high deserts?</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>No yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It's a eulogy, but also has the double meaning of "I should fail you, now that you have behaved so badly to me, if I tried to express you in poetry." This is in the context of Shakespeare's rudeness to, disappointment in, and frustration with his "W.H." (the Sonnets' intended audience/dedicatee) at various points in the sonnets. Also: "...these meanings are only worth detaching in so far as they are dissolved into the single mood of the poem" which conveys a whole texture of feelings of Shakespeare's complex mix of bitterness, tenderness and admiration of W.H.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>139ff <i>A Valediction, of Weeping</i> by John Donne: quite a striking poem where we have two lovers crying but also there's a subtext of money and greed and being mercenary because of the metaphor of "thy face coins" tears. [!!] A subtle shift in the metaphor, which later implies that their love was bound to lead to unhappiness or even unfaithfulness. The author goes through a wide range of ambiguities in the following pages covering the three stanzas of this poem, it's quite a striking poem and I had never heard of it before.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">145ff "But perhaps I am libelling this masterpiece." Empson spends four or five pages deeply analyzing the various ambiguities of this wonderful poem; I love how he is self-effacing right here.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">146ff <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44093/the-apparition-56d2230b76669" target="_blank"><i>The Apparition</i> by John Donne</a>: How a poem leaves the reader "in doubt between two moods;" an "amused contempt" which gives the narrator an air of detached interest in literature, "and the scream of agony and hatred by which this is blown aside."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">148ff Another example from <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44400/spring-and-fall" target="_blank">Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins</a>, where the ambiguity of the knowledge of death is both intuitive and intellectual: we sense it in both ways while reading the poem and yet the poet shows how they're also distinguished and separate as well. This poem is quite striking too!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">149ff See also the ambiguity from Pope's <i>Essay on Women</i> which describes a hated, gross dowager: "What is so compelling about the passage is the combination within it of two sharply distinguished shapes of mind; the finicking precision with which the subject-matter is handled; the pity, bitterness, and terror with which the subject-matter must be conceived." "In the third type [of ambiguity], two such different moods would both be included, laid side by side, made relevant as if by a generalisation; <b>in the fourth type they react with one another to produce something different from either, and here the reaction is an explosion."</b> "...it is a parody of the manner in which a gallant complement would have been paid to the ladies, and it has a ghastly air of being romantic and charming." The lines "read like one blow after another."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">151ff Finally from Wordsworth's <i>Tintern Abbey</i>: "Wordsworth was not an ambiguous poet" but he sometimes uses philosophical ambiguities: this is a striking analysis here where you can see how it can be read as Christian, Deist, even pantheistic--and the ambiguities allow all of these readings.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>["An ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author is discovering his idea in the act of writing, or not holding it at all in his mind at once, so that, for instance, there is a simile which applies to nothing exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author is moving from one to the other."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">155 Shakespeare continually does it:</div><div dir="auto">Our natures do pursue</div><div dir="auto">Like Rats that ravyn down their proper Bane</div><div dir="auto">A thirsty evil, and when we drinke we die. </div><div dir="auto">(<i>Measure for Measure,</i> I. ii)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">156ff See also the poem <i>Skylark</i> by Shelly, where there's an ambiguity moving from the flight and sounds of a lark that is compared in various ambiguous ways to the light and rays of the moon or stars; there's also a set of tumbling metaphors of human cognition and perception: our ability to understand the ineffable, the romantic appreciation of our recognition of absolute beauty, our limited ability to do so, etc. The lark is of course a metaphor for the poet in Shelly's nomenclature, also it's a symbol of the spiritual life, and further there's a lot of indications that Keats' <i>Ode to a Nightingale</i> deeply influenced this poem. It's also interesting to see how Empson picks on T.S. Eliot's criticisms of Shelly's poem!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">161 The author goes through other examples from Shelly of "fortunate muddle" where Shelly uses similes as transitions between a range of ideas, where he's "helplessly excited" by one thing at a time and then jumbles them all together.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">163 See here Swinburne and his "stock associations" in <i>Laus Veneris</i>: just comparisons of various things. "The mixed epithets of two metaphors are combined as if in a single statement not intended to be analyzed but to convey a 'mood.'"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">165 On "sleeping metaphors" and on the need, as a reader of later English poetry, to understand the various conceits traditionally used in English poetry of previous ages, so that even if a given conceit is not <i>literally</i> worked out in the poem, the reader can still feel it, and it can justify "apparent disorder" in a poem; "such poetry will often imply a direction of thought, or connection of ideas, by a transition from one sleeping metaphor to another. Later nineteenth-century poetry carried this delicacy to such a degree that it can reasonably be called decadent, because its effects depended on a tradition that its example was destroying." <b>[Interesting thoughts on the definition of "decadent" from a cultural standpoint: to use something delicate in a such a way that leads to its destruction]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">169ff Andrew Marvell, Elizabethan-era metaphysical poet, <a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/upon-death-lord-hastings-1" target="_blank">from his poem </a><i><a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/upon-death-lord-hastings-1" target="_blank">Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings</a>:</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"The gods themselves cannot their Joy conceal</div><div dir="auto">But draw their Veils, and their pure Beams reveal:</div><div dir="auto">Only they drooping Hymeneus note,</div><div dir="auto">Who for sad <i>Purple</i>, tears his <i>Saffron</i> coat,</div><div dir="auto">And trails his Torches through the Starry Hall</div><div dir="auto">Reversed, at his Darling's Funeral. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">"The young man has died on the eve of his wedding... the mood of comparison is caught before it has worked itself out" leaving the reader alone with elements loosely arranged, producing sorrow, reassurance and tenderness. But then again, once you read Marvell as a disciple of Milton, the allegories make themselves clear: saffron is the color of marriage; purple is for mourning. Hymen is also an allegorical figure, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>171 [This is a wonderful quote that really lets the reader understand what the author is trying to do in these various examples of analysis, he's apologetic yet very sincere.]</b> "I feel some word of apology or explanation is needed as to why such a particularly fantastic analysis has to be given to lines of so direct to beauty, which seem so little tortured by the intellect, which are, in fact, early work, and rather carelessly phrased [this is one of Marvell's early poems and it's not done well]. The fact is that it is precisely in such cases, when there is an elaborate and definite technique at the back of the author's mind but he is allowing it to fall into the disorders that come most easily, when he has various metaphors in mind which he means to fit in somewhere, when the effect is something rather unintelligible but with a strong poetical colour, when the mere act of wondering what it means allows it to sink, in an uncensored form, into the reader's mind; it is in just such cases that fifth type ambiguities are most likely to be found, and are most necessary as explanations."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">173 "[Andrew] Marvell was admired both by his own generation and by the nineteenth century; one may suspect that this was because they were able to read him in different ways."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">174ff See the works of Henry Vaughn, see for example <i><a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/bird-2" target="_blank">The Bird</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/palm-sunday-5" target="_blank">Palm Sunday</a></i> and <i><a href="https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10137231" target="_blank">Ascension Day</a></i>. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">175 Mention here of John Milton's poem <i>Lycidas</i> with the reference to the two-handed engine.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">175 Henry Vaughan's "<a href="https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/vaughan/ssjoy.htm" target="_blank">Joy of My Life While Left Me Here</a>"; the author takes two couplets:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>God's saints are shining lights; who stays</i></div><div dir="auto"><i><span> </span>Here long must pass</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>O'er dark hills, swift streams, and steep ways</i></div><div dir="auto"><i><span> </span>As smooth as glass.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The author writes, "One does not separate them in one's mind; it is the Romantic Movement's technique; dark hair, tidal water, landscape of dusk, are dissolved in your mind, as often in dreams, into an apparently direct sensory image which cannot be attached to any of the senses."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>{"An ambiguity of the sixth type occurs when a statement says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements; so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own and they are liable to conflict with one another."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">176ff See Moses speaking to the Lord, saying "Thou has not delivered thy people at all" although literally the quote is "Delivering thou has not delivered" in a more direct translation, thus it yields an inherent contradiction based on an idiom in Hebrew and the reader can derive all sorts of implied meanings to this phrase; also we see this kind of contradiction when used in jokes, the author goes over various examples of this from <i>Zuleika Dobson</i> by Max Beerbohm ("Zuleika was not strictly beautiful."... "She had no waist to speak of." etc.) leaving readers thinking "...it is not obvious what we are meant to believe at the end of it."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">178ff The example of the love scene between Troilus and Cressida (see III. ii. 141ff) with a similar reaction from the reader. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182ff Ambiguity of the sixth type by tautology: where there is a pun used twice, once in each sense, and a fog of the complete ambiguity will then arise from a doubt which meaning goes with which word. See <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44357/the-affliction-i" target="_blank">George Herbert's poem <i>Affliction</i></a>:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Whereas my birth and spirit rather took</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>The way that takes the town,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Thou didst betray me to a lingering book,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>And wrap me in a gown.</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>I was entangled in the world of strife</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Before I had the power to change my life.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The "gown" here is Cambridge, not in the sense of joining the church; he was betrayed into a life of contemplation, but then also entangled into a life of action, and he's doubtful which he would have preferred; he wants to change his life but it's unclear in which direction.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">183ff Also from the same poem, <i>"Let me not love thee, if I love thee not."</i> This is ambiguity by tautology, obviously, but it's also quite a beautiful line when thought of in terms of religious love or devotional love toward God.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">185ff See <i>Othello</i> and the "It is the Cause" speech (V. ii); it's unclear what the "cause" is, likewise it's unclear what is "causing the tempest in his mind" but "we are listening to a mind withdrawn upon itself, and baffled by its own agonies."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">187 "The strength of vagueness, in fact, is that it allows of secret ambiguity;" see the poem <a href="https://poets.org/poem/who-goes-fergus" target="_blank"><i>Who Goes with Fergus</i> by W.B. Yeats</a> where it's unclear what the implications are of Fergus leaving his position as king to seek out the druid in the woods; what is it that he actually rules? Should we brood about him or not? etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">190ff "The examples of the sixth class convey an evasive frame of mind; they show the author feeling that he will lose the attitude he is expressing if he looks at it too closely" and "they assume that the reader understands a great deal already, and that he is able to guess by sympathy the way the contradiction must be resolved."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>["An example of a seventh type of ambiguity... occurs when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer's mind."]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">192 Metaphorically the author describes it as a check pattern where "neither color is the ground on which the other is placed; it is at once an indecision and a structure, like the symbol of the Cross."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193 Opposites used in Freudian terminology which "could be employed with profit for the understanding of poetry."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193-4 "The study of Hebrew, by the way, and the existence of English Bibles with alternatives in the margin, may have had influence on the capacity of English for ambiguity... This is of interest because Hebrew, having very unreliable tenses, extraordinary idioms, and a strong taste for puns, possesses all the poetical advantages of a thorough primitive disorder." <b>Note also the early Egyptians used the same sign for young and old, "When a primitive Egyptian saw a baby he at once thought of an old man, and he had to learn not to do this as his language became more civilised. This certainly shows the process of attaching a word to an object as something extraordinary; nobody would do it if his language did not make him."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195 Examples of relational opposites where you can't know one without the other. (A "restive" horse.) </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">196 A quote here from Dante's <i>Inferno</i> basically referring to part of their journey where it felt like they had to return back to hell all over again.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>197 On how the contradictions are up to the reader and if they don't make sense it's the reader's fault. [!] "Since it is the business of the reader to extract the meanings useful to him and ignore the meanings he thinks foolish, it is evident that contradiction is a powerful literary weapon."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>202 A very rich quotelet from from <i>Macbeth</i> Act IV: <i>"Receive what cheer you may, the Night is long, that never finds the Day."</i> Here "receive what cheer you may" can be an imperative or prepositional phrase; death is a long night that will never "find day"; Macbeth may kill us or we may kill him; also implying villains are punished in the end; also the effect is cheerful enough but with an overtone that one can't change the length of a night, meaning that human affairs are brief and uncertain, thus don't become agitated about them.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">205ff On negatives or double negatives as a form of ambiguity: See Keats and <i>Ode to Melancholy</i>: <i>"No, no; go not to Lethe; neither twist"</i> where all the negatives obviously show that somebody (or the poet himself) must have wanted to go there very much. See also Shakespeare's casual use of the negative to imply the opposite. <i>"There's not a shirt and a half in all my company"</i> or <i>"Their lives not three good men unhanged in all England, and one of them is fat and grows old."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">209ff From <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44657/to-althea-from-prison" target="_blank"><i>To Althea, From Prison</i> by Richard Lovelace</a></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>Stone walls do not a prison make,</i></div><div dir="auto"><i><span> </span>Nor iron bars a cage;</i></div><div dir="auto"><i>Minds innocent and quiet take</i></div><div dir="auto"><i><span> </span>That for a hermitage.</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The author points out the paradox of the negation, that these things don't make a prison, but then the word "that" is used instead of "those" so then is "a hermitage" the prison? "It is curious to read 'those' instead of <i>that</i>, and see how the air of wit evaporates and general carelessness becomes a preacher's settled desire to convince. If you read 'them' there is a further shift because the metre becomes prose; sentiment might be by Bunyon, and one wonders if it is at all true."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">211ff Example of negatives used to convey ambiguity in Ophelia's song to Queen Gertrude in <i>Hamlet</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">214ff "Keats often used ambiguities of this type to convey a dissolution of normal experience into intensity of sensation." See for example <i>Ode to Melancholy</i>, which basically says don't abandon yourself to melancholy or you will lose the sensation of incipient melancholia. [!] Or, "do not achieve death, or you can no longer live in its shadow." And also note the central metaphor of the poem which unites the antithesis of melancholy and joy.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">217ff Richard Crashaw and his poem <i>Hymn To the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa</i>: here he groups religious themes with sexual themes, context that defines two situations as opposites; thus the seventh type of ambiguity: two opposites are held together and allowed to reconcile themselves; there's the overt metaphor of Christ as her [St. Teresa's] spouse but with "a strange mixture of feeling"; the author here is defending himself against an accusation of making all this into a "dirty joke"; rather, Crashaw literally thought this way, and it was a way for him to free "his virtue from the Puritan sense of shame"... "One must not say that Crashaw described a sensual form of mysticism, only that he was content to use sexual terms for his mystical experiences, because they were the best terms that he could find." Several examples to follow here of various less-ambiguous-than-you-would-think examples of juxtaposed sexual imagery and Christian spirituality. "...it draws its strength from a primitive system of ideas in which the uniting of opposites (of saviour and criminal, for instance) is of peculiar importance." See also a quatrain where Crashaw translates the <i>Dies Irae</i> where there's a pun on defecation and bowels: a very strange juxtaposition of something gross with the purest spirituality.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">224ff "I shall end this chapter with a more controlled and intelligible example from George Herbert, where the contradictory impulses that are held in equilibrium by the doctrine of atonement may be seen in a luminous juxtaposition."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">226ff On <a href="https://www.georgeherbert.org.uk/archives/selected_work_19.html" target="_blank">George Herbert and his poem <i>The Sacrifice</i></a>: "a doctrinal poem" with "a magnificence he never excelled." The poem is about the crucifixion from the perspective of Jesus himself, and it talks about the metaphor of destroying the Temple of Jerusalem and raising it again later; there's a unification of Jesus being a Jew yet being killed by Jews, etc. This is quite a good and affecting poem.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">234 "I must devote a final chapter to some remarks about what I have been doing; about the conditions under which ambiguity is proper, about the degree to which the understanding of it is of immediate importance, and about the way in which it is apprehended."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>234 On how words have denotations (or meanings) and connotations (associations and relations to other words); noting that denotations imply or indicate a sort of asceticism (restriction of meaning to what it means), while connotations are a sort of hedonism (many meanings as needed, as wanted); these are conflicting forces in language. [Interesting idea here!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">236 On using ambiguity improperly: "one is tempted to set down a muddle in the hope that it will convey the meaning more immediately." <b>[Basically, it's cheating if you throw a lot of paint at the wall and expect your readers to "see" something in it.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">236 Empson gives an example of a newspaper headline "Italian Assassin Bomb Plot Disaster" and discusses the various potential meanings/uses of each word, the grammar (which is ambiguous itself), and how the headline is even somewhat poetic.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">239ff He goes through an example here of how we apprehend and gets into sort of a metaphysical discussion of how we look at words and yet think sort of probabilistically about the syntax: we as readers are ready to change it around as necessary, especially in poetry.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>247 Quite a good quote here on requirements for reading and analyzing poetry. "They [readers] must possess a fair amount of equilibrium or fairly strong defenses; they must have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely (one may call that feminine) then, having fixed the reaction, properly stained, on a slide, they must be able to turn the microscope on to it with a certain indifference and without smudging it with their fingers; they must be able to prevent their new feelings of the same sort from interfering with the process of understanding the original ones (one may call that 'masculine') and have enough to detachment not to mind what their sources I'm satisfaction may turn out to be."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>249ff On two sorts of literary critic: the appreciative and the analytical:</b> "the difficulty is that they have all got to be both." "An appreciator produces literary effects similar to the one he is appreciating... perhaps by using longer and plainer language... his version is more intelligible than the original... Having been shown what to look for, they [readers] are intended to go back to the original and find it there for themselves." The analyst critic works differently: he sets out to explain in terms of the reader's experience why a work has the effect on him that is assumed. "He is not repeating the effect; he may even be preventing it from happening again."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">250ff Interesting discussion here on what one could call the author's aesthetic for literary criticism: what form it should take, how it should be done, how it should be explained (plainly, using "intellectually handy terms" and avoiding hinting at things, avoiding arrogance or snobbery). Also on the idea of identifying machinery to express distinctions in poetry: the author also notes that sometimes he needs to look up words in order to express these distinctions, but <i>he knew them already in his mind,</i> otherwise how could he look them up in the first place? On describing the idea that while you need a certain way to say something, it isn't always obvious how to say that something.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>256 "I should claim, then, that for those who find this book contains novelties, it will make poetry more beautiful, without ever having to remember the novelties, or endeavor to apply them. It seems a sufficient apology for many niggling pages."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Vocab:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><i>Tempus edax rerum</i>: "time, that devours all things" (literally: "time, gluttonous of things", <i>edax</i>: adjectival form of the verb <i>edo</i> to eat)</div><div dir="auto"><i>Scoptophile</i>: one who takes great pleasure in looking (at an object or a person)</div><div dir="auto"><i>Gongorism</i>: a literary style characterized by studied obscurity and by the use of various ornate devices (Spanish: <i>gongorismo</i>, from Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, 1561-1627)</div><div dir="auto"><i>Zeugma</i>: a type of double meaning; a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts)</div><div dir="auto"><i>Nescience</i>: a synonym for ignorance, but with the connotation of a less active form of ignorance, a simple "not knowing" rather than an active ignoring of something</div><div dir="auto"><i>Agora</i>: (in ancient Greece) a public open space used for assemblies and markets</div><div dir="auto"><i>Orrery</i>: a mechanical model of the solar system, or of just the sun, earth, and moon, used to represent their relative positions and motions</div><div dir="auto"><i>Otiose</i>: serving no practical purpose or result</div><div dir="auto"><i>Expatiate</i>: speak or write at length or in detail</div><div dir="auto"><i>Unshriven</i>: unconfessed; unabsolved of sins; also, effectively unabsolved</div><div dir="auto"><i><a href="https://youtu.be/QW8ek5l2eCY?si=_0HMc73IVz71-a7P" target="_blank">Dies Irae</a></i>: a Latin hymn sung in a mass for the dead</div><div dir="auto"><i>Oratio Obliqua</i>: Indirect speech, reported speech, indirect discourse; the practice, common in all Latin historical writers, of reporting spoken or written words indirectly, using different grammatical forms.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b> </div><div dir="auto">William Empson: <i>The Structure of Complex Worlds</i></div><div dir="auto">Edith Sitwell's poetry</div><div dir="auto">Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne</div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">Works of John Donne, see in particular <i><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44132/a-valediction-of-weeping" target="_blank">A Validiction, of Weeping</a></i></div><div>John Millington Synge: <i>Dierdre of the Sorrows</i> (play)</div></div><div dir="auto">John Milton: <i><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44733/lycidas" target="_blank">Lycidas</a></i> [note specifically the conceit of the "two-handed engine"]</div></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"></div></div></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-14501352828654856302023-11-29T03:31:00.000-08:002023-11-29T03:33:01.703-08:00Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming [review short]<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto">These are fun throwaway novels. Occasionally a really well-turned phrase, interesting settings, good plots and memorable villains. The book <i>Live and Let Die</i> is so much better than the movie featuring Roger Moore that I almost feel pity for my generation who grew up thinking <i>that</i> was James Bond.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">The allegedly racist parts of the novel (<a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/casino-royale-by-ian-fleming.html" target="_blank">the parts that are shortly to be sanitized</a>) aren't particularly racist, with the unfortunate exception of Chapter 5 (lamentably titled "Nigger Heaven"). This chapter is actually rather tone deaf: Fleming did not appear to know Harlem all that well, he attempts to write in a sort of dialect... He tried. It's presumably with the aim of creating what would feel like a thrilling, exotic atmosphere to his 1950s-era readers in England, but it's beyond his ability as a writer to do it convincingly. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto">* <i>"I smoke about three packs a day."</i> The James Bond of the novels remains far more interesting than the modern smoke-free and vice-free Bond of the movies. The modern movie Bond obviously can't smoke; he can't even womanize. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Funny subtle reference here to the OG of the USA's Deep State, J. Edgar Hoover: <i>"Bond laughed. 'What an organization!' [the FBI] he said. 'I'm sure it's all beautifully covered up and alibied. What a man! He [Hoover] certainly seems to have the run of this country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven't got him on our hands in England."</i> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Note Bond and Leiter's abject horror at all the old people in southern Florida. Quite a contrast with today's forever young Boomers teeming all over places like The Villages.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Also an offhand reference to NJ before it became overrun:</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdXgZt9I8M9Le6iUbCmbYXI8ZFWSELOja0X3ReJvWRn3IWvfDtzPgnpAWFbMzQkeYi1uqkk92ymJhQ_kUo9O6IBYfGkBQ2qhVGAgjGG0rNHNp9wubt90PyAnxvUKNaCC3iaF4cnf7KJFS1ep1K6dvGzuvOphz4GTm69BhKHueICnbkPubJ_6HyIaYQvnQ/s2794/IMG_20231125_120244603.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="2794" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRdXgZt9I8M9Le6iUbCmbYXI8ZFWSELOja0X3ReJvWRn3IWvfDtzPgnpAWFbMzQkeYi1uqkk92ymJhQ_kUo9O6IBYfGkBQ2qhVGAgjGG0rNHNp9wubt90PyAnxvUKNaCC3iaF4cnf7KJFS1ep1K6dvGzuvOphz4GTm69BhKHueICnbkPubJ_6HyIaYQvnQ/w640-h202/IMG_20231125_120244603.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* Interesting (pseudo-?) history about the pirate Captain "Bloody" Morgan, who practiced his piracy on Spanish shipping in the 1600s, and whose activity England indirectly supported, but later disavowed in order to avoid a war with Spain. It does make you think about different types of non-governmental "hard" and "soft power": where countries will use indirect instruments of power to project force, destabilize shipping lanes, etc. It's interesting to think about how piracy would actually be <i>supported</i> by a government if it helped that government's interests. Makes you think.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* "This was Quarrel, the Cayman Islander, and Bond liked him immediately. There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him and his face was strong and angular and his mouth was almost severe. His eyes were grey. It was only the spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands that were negroid." It's always striking to read how much English writers (and presumably English culture) used and depended on physiognomy to describe and predict behavior. You see it from Shakespeare to Austin, to Dickens and right up until the mid 20th century... where all notions of physiognomy suddenly disappear from the record. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">* The climax happens in the last ten pages and it requires an unbelievably lucky coincidence of timing.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">Wilfred Trotter: <i>Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace</i></div><div dir="auto"></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-18504193512477840012023-11-29T03:08:00.000-08:002023-11-30T03:52:40.342-08:00A Man For All Markets by Edward O. Thorp<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">A good read--especially if you're interested in gambling, probability or unusual investing problems--and still a tolerable read even if you're not. The book grabs you early on, but by the last third it loses some of its momentum and becomes a bit too didactic. All in all an interesting autobiography of a rigorous thinker: Thorp is a sort of Richard Feynman of the mathematics world--uh, just without mashing all the young coeds.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">It's instructive to read Thorp's extensive thoughts about Bernie Madoff (see pages 213ff). Thorp identified the Madoff fraud many, <i>many</i> years before the truth came out, and not only is it one of the most interesting parts of the book, but it shows how "experts" and "authorities" (like the SEC, or the supposedly "watchdog" media) fail to act on or even <i>perceive</i> a fraud, while an outsider with critical thinking skills can easily identify one. It's a staggering embarrassment that the Madoff fraud lasted as long as it did and got to the scale it did, and today's SB-F/FTX fraud adds just another chapter in the book on how corrupt and incompetent media and regulators never seem to find what they refuse to look for. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">If you're fascinated by blackjack and other casino games (like I am), you'll find a lot of meat in Chapters 4-8 where Thorp talks about various systems to improve player odds--as well as quite a few shocking events that happened to him across his journey, as he made a <i>lot</i> of money at the casino tables, published his famous book <i>Beat the Dealer</i>, and was victimized by outright casino cheating. These are the best chapters of the book. You'll also see (both from this book and from other books like Ben Mezrich's wonderful <i>Bringing Down the House</i>) how casinos can be run by a bunch of real dicks: they seem willing to do almost anything to stop successful players.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Investing geeks will enjoy Thorp's unusual path through the investing world, as he arbitrages convertible bonds and options, invests in "thrift conversions" and so on. Thorp has a smart takes on all of these secret corners of investing</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">I mentioned above that the book loses momentum towards the end: the last third of the book devolves into standard vanilla advice on investing, information better drawn from books by Jack Bogle or anything by William Bernstein.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, I wanted to link here two long-form interviews Tim Ferriss did with Ed Thorp, <a href="https://tim.blog/2022/05/24/ed-thorp/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://tim.blog/2022/06/28/edward-o-thorp-2/" target="_blank">here</a> for any readers curious to hear more from a very smart and unusual thinker.</div><div dir="auto"><b><br /></b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes: </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface:</b></div>x "Rather than subscribing to widely accepted views--such as <i>you can't beat the casinos</i>--I checked for myself." <b>["I checked for myself" is a sort of distillation of Thorp's entire intellectual modus operandi: he never accepts received wisdom, never automatically believes the consensus view on anything. <i>He checks for himself</i>. And often finds the consensus view hilariously wrong, judging by how much money he made beating casinos at various games. I love this guy's attitude, and I take this phrase as a metaphor for being a truthseeker, being an autodidact, being a rigorous (and utterly anti-lazy) thinker who does not automatically assume or adopt conventional ways of thinking about anything.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Foreword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:</b></div><div dir="auto">xiv "As Warren Buffett said: 'In order to succeed you must first survive.' You need to avoid ruin. At all costs."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">xiv "And there is a dialectic between you and your P/L: You start betting small (a proportion of initial capital) and your risk control--the dosage--also controls your discovery of the edge. It is like trial and error, by which you revise both your risk appetite and your assessment of your odds one step at a time."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Loving to Learn</b></div><div dir="auto">3ff Thorp doesn't speak until his third birthday and then speaks in complete sentences. A savant as a child: curious and relentless, experimental, reading anything he can get his hands on.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11ff He grows up during the Depression, money was very tight, he comments on the irrational frugality and hoarding tendencies of Depression-era people; also he figured out the idea of shoveling driveways around the neighborhood, but other kids copied him--thus he learned quickly about how competition drives down profits. [Also an indirect lesson about "moats"/barriers to competition]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">19ff Fascinating to see his opportunism and his sense of right and wrong when it came to his newspaper route; the paperboy's supervisor started taking a cut from their income, and collectively the paperboys went on strike (which led to the supervisor being replaced ultimately) but Thorp had already moved on to delivering the <i>Los Angeles Daily News</i>, a different newspaper.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Science Is My Playground</b></div><div dir="auto">22ff He gets his ham radio license, learns Morse code; members of his extended family comes back from internment (by the Japanese military in the Philippines) and not everyone survived; he experiments with weather balloons, radio, gunpowder, "guncotton," nitroglycerine.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">36ff He's also a genuine self-starter: takes the statewide chemistry test to try to win a scholarship; he starts a science club; deals with being one of the outs in his high school class (not wealthy, doesn't have a car), he gets together with other students to start a student government political party; at a high school reunion 46 years later he notes how the "cool" students hadn't changed: high school had been the apex of their lives [this is pretty common observation for those who were not the coolest kids in high school!]; he blasts through a list of great novels between his junior and senior year; he wins a statewide physics contest; he is a nationwide finalist in the Westinghouse science talent search; he even gets to meet Harry Truman: "I remember the feel of his hand as we shook: firm, compact, and with the sensation of a leather chair lightly dusted with talcum powder."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[You can see another example of the grievous inflation in education costs--and how what used to be significant driver of peoples' social mobility in Thorp's day is now a cruel barrier <i>against</i> social mobility in the modern era:</b> when Thorp goes to UC Berkeley in the 1940s his annual tuition is $70. That is not a misprint! If you adjust it for inflation it would be maybe $1,000 or at most $2,000 a year today in inflation-adjusted dollars. Guess at what Berkeley's tuition (not room and board, just tuition) is today? $14k, or more than 7x what would be an inflation-adjusted "real" price for tuition in his day.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Physics and Mathematics</b></div><div dir="auto">45ff 1949: he heads off to Berkeley. His parents recently divorced, he also learned that his mother cashed the war bonds he had bought with his paper route and she spent the money, this estranged them for years. He's totally broke as a student and lives off of $100 a month.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46 His chem professor offers 10c per misprint to report errors in his school textbook; Thorp finds quite a large number of errors and retroactively the professor changes the rules and doesn't pay up; Thorp talks about how he later encountered other examples of a "unilateral retroactive change in the deal" both off and on Wall Street. Somebody also sabotages his chemical sample in a final exam; the teaching assistant took no action even when when the sabotage was proven and it cost Thorp his position as first in his class; so he changes majors to physics and mathematics, which turned out to be a great decision in hindsight.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">50ff He butts heads, aggressively, with his physics professor, almost gets expelled; had he gotten expelled he would have been promptly drafted to Korea.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>51 Two good heuristics/questions he asks himself as guidelines:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>1) If you do this, what do you want to happen?</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>2) If you do this, what do you think will happen?</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">51ff He graduates, treats himself to a six-week road trip to Manhattan; stops in Las Vegas on the way, leaving him "with conflicting, but vivid, images." His travel companion is a weightlifter, he tells a story about how Thorp stumbled into a gym with other students and discovered an interest in fitness and health. [just take one look at the book's jacket photo at about age 84 and you can see the dude is a healthy, youthful guy. He's now 91.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>53 On the martingale system </b>for doubling up on bets at roulette: you bet red or black and after each loss you bet twice as much on the next spin on the same color. Eventually you will win, and that win covers the previous string of losses, plus a profit of $1. Then start again at $1 and repeat the whole doubling process. "The catch is that after many doublings, your required bet can be so large that either you have run out of money or the casino won't allow it." [Also imagine the volatility in "ending wealth" using this system, it's sort of the diametrical opposite of the Kelly Criterion.] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">54ff Thorp ends up working towards a PhD in physics <i>and</i> math; he gets back together with his prior girlfriend Vivian.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">58 He comes into contact with Richard Feynman and asks him if there was any way to beat the game of roulette. "When he said there wasn't, I was relieved and encouraged. This suggested that no one had yet worked out what I believed was possible." <b>[!!! A great example here of practicing "I checked for myself" and deriving a correct, but counterintuitive, conclusion from a confidently declared statement from an "expert." Wonderful!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">60 He gets three letters of recommendation from teachers in the math department at UCLA; one was from his advisor and was rather faint in its praise: it turns out professor Angus Taylor never complimented anyone, was very, <i>very</i> spare with his praise, and this was one of the most complimentary letters of recommendation he'd ever written. It reminded Thorp of his father's reaction when he brought home a 99 on an exam and his father would ask why he didn't get a 100. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Las Vegas</b></div><div dir="auto">61ff 1958: Thorp heads to Vegas, learns about a strategy for playing blackjack, continues to work on his plans to beat roulette. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">63ff A quick burst of blackjack insight right here from Thorp: "A player may stand at any time. The dealer's edge is that the player must risk busting first, losing immediately, even if the dealer later also goes over 21, though in effect they have tied. Because he loses when they both bust, a player who follows the dealer's strategy for his hands has a disadvantage of about 6 percent." <b>[I don't know how many times I've stood on cards and have made other players at the table quite angry with me for "not following the rules," but I totally agree: <i>you have to avoid busting at all costs!</i> It's a total unforced error.]</b> He loses $8.50 of his $10 stake and quits, but he's hooked on the game. <b>"The atmosphere of ignorance and superstition surrounding the blackjack table that day had convinced me that even good players didn't understand the mathematics underlying the game. I returned home intending to find a way to win."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Conquering Blackjack</b></div><div dir="auto">67ff Thorp discovers the <b>contiguous probability of blackjack: that the probability of any card coming out of the deck <i>depends in part on what is still left in the deck</i> and thus the player's or the house's edge can shift--sometimes dramatically--as play continues.</b> Thus you would vary your bets accordingly. Starting with the Baldwin strategy, which depended on nothing being known about the cards which had already been played, he works out some programming on an IBM 704 mainframe that he had access to at MIT (where he had taken his first job); discovers rules that produce a 0.21% advantage to the house if you played perfectly without tracking the deck; Twenty years later, working things out with much more powerful computers, he had developed rules that he went on to put into his book <i>Beat the Dealer</i> with a 0.13% advantage for the player (also without tracking the cards); <b>then he starts testing for changes in odds as cards come out of the deck:</b> with just the aces played, the player disadvantage goes to 2.72%, a tremendous shift; this proves that the odds would shift significantly as certain cards were played, thus an ace-rich deck would give the player a big advantage; the heuristic works such that <b>as small cards (two, three, four, five, six) come out of the deck and are played the player's odds are helped enormously</b>. Thus people started using a running count system based on "little cards" versus "large cards" coming out of the deck: if a little card comes out of the deck that's +1 for each, while if a large card (10 or higher) comes out of the deck that's -1. Note also that <b>fives were particularly valuable to the player if they came out of the deck</b>: a five is what turns a 16 into a 21 when the dealer has to take a hit; the house loves little cards to be in the deck, and the player hates it: the player wants little cards to come out early rather than late. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">75ff See also a simple winning system based on "following the fives": the likelihood of all fives being gone increases as fewer cards remain and the odds delta for removing four fives from the deck gives the player an edge of 3.29%, thus you can bet small whenever any fives are left and bet big whenever all the fives are gone. Thorp built a system following "ten richness" as well as "five richness."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76 He had some of his mathematical work stolen after he sent it to a well-known California mathematician for comments, Thorp takes the high road here and doesn't name the guy but the plagiarist ends up giving a talk on it, presenting it as part of his original work and published it under his own name in a major mathematical journal.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">77 Thorp publishes his first paper on beating blackjack in a prestigious math journal; also meets with Claude Shannon to get his approval; he expects a brief meeting with him but they end up talking all day long, including discussing roulette: here's where this book intersects a little bit with <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-eudaemonic-pie-by-thomas-bass.html" target="_blank">The Eudaemonic Pie</a>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: The Day of the Lamb</b></div><div dir="auto">80ff Thorp presents his "beat the dealer" paper to a big crowd in DC (and to mockery from the casinos); is interviewed by Tom Wolfe for the Washington <i>Post</i>. He's pretty much nonplussed by all the fame and attention from this first paper. You also feel like what he really want is to prove that his theory worked in the real world; he also gets calls from some New York based multi-millionaires who want to bankroll him; ultimately he meets with Emmanuel "Manny" Kimmel from Maplewood New Jersey (the other wealthy businessman was Eddie Hand, from Upstate New York); he starts flying weekly to New York on Wednesdays to practice playing 10-count with him. "At the end of each session Kimmel would give me $100 or $150 to cover expenses and, curiously, a salami. These salamis added an unmistakable aroma to the cabin during my return flight." (!!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>88ff [It's interesting to see how he's fairly slow at getting up to speed with bet size and aggression; this is frustrating to his backers who are much bigger whales at gambling.] He bets "only at a level at which I was emotionally comfortable and not advancing until I was ready," this "enabled me to play my system with a calm and discipline to accuracy."</b> He later transposes this into stock market investing later in his life. Note also how the casinos adapt to him and start shuffling decks sooner once they think he's using a system.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">90 "...the Ten-Count System had shown moderately heavy losses mixed with 'lucky' streaks of the most dazzling brilliance. I learned later that this was a characteristic of a random series of favorable bets. And I would see it again and again in real life in both the gambling and the investment worlds." <b>[Holy cow is he ever right.]</b> See also page 96 "blackjack had still more to teach me, about both investing and how the world worked." <b>[Another truism that explains why many investors become fascinated with casino games and vice versa.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">92ff Interesting how one of his backers insists on playing alongside him but doesn't have Thorp's emotional continence, he bets rashly and wildly.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">93 Another iteration from the house: they start shuffling the deck every time he raises his bet size (!); <b>[see also the very interesting footnote here for page 93 where Thorp realized later that he "would have had an advantage if I had started each deal with big bets, maintaining them if the count was good and causing the dealer to shuffle when it wasn't." This is exceptional second-order thinking right here, a very <i>very</i> interesting adaptive response to something unfair.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">94 About 30 man-hours of play yielded in $11,000 profit on a $10,000 bank roll with a peak drawdown of $1,300. [To adjust for inflation you could put a 10 or 12x multiple on this, not bad!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: Card Counting for Everyone</b></div><div dir="auto">97 He talks about cashing a $100 bill at the MIT cafeteria in 1961, likening it to a $1,000 bill today.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">99 Thorp meets and works with an unnamed Harvard Law student using a blackjack method called end play, using single deck games dealt all the way down.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">100 He realizes he has to learn much more about methods casinos use to cheat players; these things would inevitably happen to his readers. Many thoughts follow here and elsewhere in the book on breaking your play into shifts, making sure casino employees don't notice you, playing down the fact that you're winning, hiding your stack of chips, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>102 "Mathematically, interruptions [in blackjack play] didn't matter, because my lifetime of playing was just one long series of hands... This principle applies in both gambling and investing."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">102ff Back to identifying times when he was cheated: some of the techniques involved "peek and second card dealing" ("An expert cheat or magician does this so well that even when you are told in advance and are watching close up, you can't see."); also <b>"Cheating was so relentless during those days in Las Vegas that I spent as much time learning about the many ways it was being done as I did playing."</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">104ff He discovers that the Gaming Board of Nevada is corrupt; he's assigned a gaming control board agent to watch over him to protect him from cheating, <i>but it turns out the guy was there to finger him for the casinos</i>. <b>"This trip taught me that while playing well, even with experts to warn me of dirty dealing, I could no longer openly win a significant amount."</b> Worse: "Mickey McDougall told the gaming control board that he saw more cheating in Nevada casinos while watching my eight days of play than he had seen in all of his previous five years of working for the board. After his damning report he was never again asked to consult by them." See also in the 1960s tens of million dollars of cash were laundered through the counting rooms, likely to fund mob operations throughout the nation; card counters would be jailed on flimsy pretexts and their money would be taken, some were beaten up; since the 60s and 70s Nevada has cleaned up, cheating by casinos is rare. However casinos began using more and more "non-cheating" countermeasures; ejecting card-counting players, reshuffling more frequently, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">108ff "It was becoming clear that there was more to beating blackjack than counting cards and keeping cool as your bankroll went up and down. The green felt table was a stage and I was an actor on that stage. <b>A card counter who wanted to be allowed to continue playing had to put on an effective act and present a non-threatening persona."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: Players Versus Casinos</b></div><div dir="auto">112ff Other casino and player adjustments: </div><div dir="auto">* Casinos introduced multi-deck shoes (although note that the High-Low system still worked, it didn't matter how many decks)</div><div dir="auto">* Casinos would keep a shared photo gallery of "undesirable" players who were barred on sight. </div><div dir="auto">* Players were forming informal networks: combining bankrolls; see also MIT's blackjack team with Tommy Hyland; see also the "Big Player" method: since if any player makes a big jump in betting it's a red flag to casino personnel, thus one solution was to make a signal to a team member who acted like a big drunk high roller who would make large bets but only when the deck was favorable.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">117 Current casino surveillance involves facial recognition software and RFID chips to keep track of players' bets; also machines looking for patterns characteristic of the play of card counters in order to detect and eject these players.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">118ff Thorp starts doing research into shuffling: one method is paying attention to where the aces are and what card follows it, this is called "Ace locating" and if you can do this for all four aces this can give you a powerful advantage. <b>"Casinos typically use standardized shuffling techniques, which can be analyzed."</b> You can also keep track of chunks of cards that are rich in aces and tens as they get redistributed in a deck. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">119 He gets comped by the Las Vegas Wymm casino: free food, room and shows in return for not playing blackjack. [!!] And then Thorp discovers a new shuffle that would prevent shuffle tracking, but he keeps it to himself.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">119 Nevada casinos were permitted to bar players but New Jersey casinos could not.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">121 "Can an ordinary player still beat the game? My answer is a qualified yes."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: A Computer that Beats Roulette</b></div><div dir="auto">124ff Thorp joins forces with Claude Shannon, they end up building wearable equipment not too different from the <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-eudaemonic-pie-by-thomas-bass.html" target="_blank">Eudaemonic Pie team</a>, but many years earlier with much cruder equipment. They found a 44% average profit or benefit to the player. Shannon is a real kook and Thorp really loves working with him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>129ff They discovered the work of John Kelly and start using the Kelly Criterion bet-sizing strategy.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">130 They discovered that a lot of Nevada roulette wheels are tilted: "half-chip [meaning half the thickness of a casino chip] and even one-chip tilts were common." This boosted their advantage.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">130 Their system is way more effective than Doyne and Farmer's system!! It's also the first wearable computer and this is back in 1961.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>133ff Again, the real problem is not beating the game per se, it's beating the game yet not being detected by the counterparty, the casino: it's an arms race with the casino itself to remain disguised, to not be detected, to win in a way that's carefully camouflaged, etc.</b> The need for all this misdirection and disguise is really the gating factor. Note also that Nevada passed a very broad law limiting the use of any computers or equipment to predict outcomes in casinos.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">135 There's a weird reference here "We met for the last time in 1968" but Claude Shannon didn't die until 2001: it makes you wonder if they had a falling out or something... there's no other discussion of him elsewhere in the book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: An Edge at Other Gambling Games</b></div><div dir="auto">136ff Thorp settles into New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, he meets a bunch of interesting people: Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto; Stanislaw Ulam, one of the designers of the H-bomb and co-discoverer of the Ulam-Teller concept [the conceptual design behind the H-bomb], etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">137ff He tries his hand at calculating the odds of (and beating) baccarat; explanation of how the game works (sort of); a discovery that the opportunities come towards the end of a shoe, but their are not very many opportunities in baccarat; the house edge is greater as well. The only place they found a potential edge was in side betting; note also the deck has 416 cards, thus card counting is much more difficult.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>139 How do you tell whether a mathematician is an introvert or an extrovert? If he looks at his shoes when he talks to you, he's an introvert. If he looks at your shoes, he's an extrovert.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>141ff Disturbing anecdote about Thorp playing baccarat at a The Dunes Vegas casino in 1963:</b> the casino places shill players at the table to coincidentally "open up seats" to maximize player enthusiasm; this casino stationed two shills on either side of Thorp once they figured out who he was. Also: "A baccarat table was twenty-five times as profitable as a blackjack table." <b>It turns out this casino <i>actually drugs his coffee</i> once they see he has a system that works. They tried to drug him again the next night; then they ask him to leave; also it appears that someone tampered and tried to sabotage their car on the way home, jamming the accelerator.</b> [Jesus] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 11: Wall Street: The Greatest Casino on Earth</b></div><div dir="auto">145 <b>"Gambling is investing simplified. Both can be analyzed using mathematics, statistics, and computers. ...Each requires money management, choosing the proper balance between risk and return. ... The psychological makeup to succeed and investing also has similarities to that for gambling. Great investors are often good at both."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">146ff Clearly he married the right woman! He asked his wife Vivian "What were my mistakes?" with a specific stock that he had bought that got cut in half. She answers "First, you bought something you didn't really understand, so it was no better or worse than throwing a dart into the stock market list. Had you bought a low-load mutual fund [no-load funds weren't available yet then] you would have had the same expected gain but less expected risk." He also notes the arbitrary decision to want to get out at the [arbitrary and meaningless] price he paid (the psychological error of anchoring), and choosing an irrelevant criterion to sell.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">149ff He learns other lessons: the fleeting nature of momentum investing; the dangers of leverage (he makes ill-founded bets on silver with 1/3 down); he learns about agency risk as he sees that salesman and promoters willing to lend to "help" him buy more of a commodity don't necessarily have his interests in mind; he's starts to believe that the academics were right in claiming there's no way to have an edge in the markets but <b>"once again I decided to see for myself."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">151ff He has a revelation when a pamphlet on warrants arrives in the mail [basically warrants are long-dated call options]; he comes up with the idea of hedging warrants, also at this point he moves to UC Irvine and has a colleague, Sheen Kassouf, who wrote a PhD thesis on warrant hedging. They would short overpriced warrants and hedge by going long the underlying common stock. He ends his collaboration with Sheen and then begins running hedged warrant and convert portfolios for friends and acquaintances.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 12: Bridge with Buffett</b></div><div dir="auto">155ff The dean of UC Irvine's graduate school invests with Thorp, using money that he had invested in Warren Buffett's hedge fund (which Buffett was shutting down); this is 1968; also this guy invites Thorp and his wife to meet Warren Buffett and his wife.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">157ff Non-transitivity: games like rock, paper, scissors or non-transitive dice, where the transitive rule [if A > B, and B > C, therefore A > C] does not hold, you find this in voting preferences, </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">162ff Interesting to hear the numbers he's talking about for the amount of capital he has in his investment partnership: only about $1.4m in 1969 dollars. Before he started his official partnership he was running $400k and earning about $20,000 a year from it, about the same as he earned at his job as professor. In the modern area you need at <i>least</i> $10m to run a one-man investment firm to make the numbers make sense, thanks to legal, accounting, bookkeeping requirements and other cost structures that come along with that. And if you think about it looking at the inflation we've had since 1969 (the author includes a CPI chart in the back of the book although it runs only to 2013), but if you extrapolate inflation forward from then, his $1.4m then is actually worth roughly $10m today, about the same.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">165: Thorp also invests in Berkshire Hathaway thanks to having met Buffett.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 13: Going Into Partnership</b></div><div dir="auto">166ff On his firm Convertible Hedge Associates, later he renames it [more felicitously] to Princeton Newport Partners, which specialized in hedging warrants, options, convertible bonds and preferreds, also working with other types of derivatives, designing hedges and inventing hedging techniques, it was a type of quant fund.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>167 "Betting on a hedge I had researched was like betting on a blackjack hand where I had the advantage. As in blackjack, I could estimate my expected return, estimate my risk, and choose how much of my bankroll to bet." [The gigantic nuance here is in a casino a blackjack hand typically would have a $500 maximum bet, with a bankroll of $10,000; now he's got a $1.4 million dollar "bankroll" and can be betting 50k to 100k per hedge.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">170 Using the options pricing formula of French mathematician Louis Bachelier: Also on Einstein citing a paper from Robert Brown talking about Brownian motion, about pollen particles suspended in water, Einstein arrives at statistical properties to describe the random motion of these particles, which he translated to show proof that atoms and molecules were real. <b>Note that these equations were the same essentially as Bachelier's equations five years earlier to describe the irregular motion of stock and options prices.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">172 He anticipates the work of Fisher Black and Myron Scholes, who were motivated actually by his book <i>Beat the Market</i>; by using the US T-bill with the same expiration of a warrant expiration to discount it back at a riskless interest rate. Thorp says he started using the same formula earlier, in 1967, when Black-Scholes published the identical formula in 1972. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">172ff His fund's performance is genuinely impressive! He outperforms the S&P in 1969, 1970 and 1971, then puts up a 12% return in 1972 (worse than the S&P which printed 18.5% that year); stable, steady returns regardless of the market backdrop. In 1973 his fund was up 6.5% with the market down 15.2% [!!] and in 1974 Thorp was up 9% up vs the S&P being down 27% [!!!]; also his fund had only one down month in 1974 (and even that was less than -1%) despite high volatility in the overall stock market, note also the 1973-74 correction was -48%. His fund never had a losing year and never had even a down quarter! [Holy cow.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">176 With the opening of the Chicago Board of Exchange Options Market and the standardization of options prices, he programs a computer to run his options pricing equation, Thorp then later finds that Black-Scholes were releasing a paper on their options pricing model (the same formula Thorp had already discovered from Bachelier and was already using), thus it was soon to be public knowledge and everyone would soon be using it. <b>"Fortunately, this took a while. When the CBOE open for business we appear to be the only ones trading from the formula. Down on the floor of the exchange it was like firearms versus bows and arrows."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">177ff On his wife's uncanny ability to judge people's character and check life stories for consistency. <b>[I'm slow as hell, but am discovering this same thing: if you have a partner who can read the room and cross-check things/notice things while you're dealing with people, it's hugely helpful, it's like a superpower.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>181ff Interesting to see how his lifestyle starts to inflate as his investment partnership does better and better... and he takes himself right out of his circle of academic friends who he was closest to. I bet this is an all-too-common mistake.</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">182ff He gets involved in UC Irvine's academic bureaucracy and discovers why academics are so vicious [like the old joke "because the stakes are so small!"]. He can't believe the factionalism and backstabbing, the petty squabbles; he ultimately decides to leave academia.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 14: Front-Running the Quantitative Revolution</b></div><div dir="auto">185 The CBOE starts trading put options in 1974.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186ff Interesting here: he was about to share a mathematical method for pricing American-style put options with Fisher Black, but he realized Black didn't know the answer/model at all, so he unobtrusively pulled the paper away because he wanted to use it for his investment partners. He realized that if Black didn't know the answer <i>no one did,</i> and realized this was a huge competitive advantage. Fascinating! Thorp had a variety of different edges like these until they were discovered by the academic world and then widely shared.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">188 His fund was up tremendously, with stable and positive performance, from 1973 to 1976 when the S&P was roller-coastering down 36% and then up 61% for a net (compounded) gain of just 1%.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">189ff Good basic explanation here of a convertible bond, combining a bond with an option to convert.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">190ff Stress-testing: although Thorp pays more attention to the tail risks than typical VAR models, other discussions of risk; Thorp trafficking in gold, silver and copper; taking advantage of contango spreads, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 15: Rise...</b></div><div dir="auto">194 His fund's performance is amazing: up 409% over the 1970s versus +4.6% for the S&P; this works out to +17.7% per year gross and +14.1% per year after fees. Tremendous outperformance. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">195ff They start getting into the prediction game, trying to look for indicators for the overall stock market, <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-predictors-by-thomas-bass.html" target="_blank">the kind of stuff that the team in The Predictors was working on</a>, standard quantitative stuff.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">196-7 The AT&T/Seven Sisters trade in 1983 is kind of staggering: Thorp put on $330 million in total exposure, netting (only?) a $1.6 million profit in two and a half months. I wonder about the true risk for a transaction like this?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">198 Thorp's response to the 1987 crash is interesting: <b>"Our investments were either safe, thoroughly protected by hedging as I believed them to be, or not."</b> [Talk about binary! But I get it: a stock is either a zero or it's not.] He was already aware of academic finance's dependence on the assumption of normal distribution of stock prices and knew that stock prices were much noisier than that, that they had much fatter tails.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">200ff Thorp's next move right after the 1987 crash is to arb the S&P futures with the S&P index itself (the arb spread had widened ridiculously right after the 87 crash; he had to browbeat his head trader into doing the trade, who was frozen with fear; the fund ends the month of October flat compared to the S&P down 22%.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">202 Results were amazing for his fund: they <i>crushed</i> the S&P from 1969 to 1988, +22.8% annually before fees, +18.2% annually net of fees, versus +11.5% for the S&P. Wow.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 16: ...And Fall</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>204ff Giuliani raids Thorp's PNP offices in New Jersey in an effort to get info on Mike Milken. This first quote...</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>"In the middle of the day on Thursday, December 17th, 1987, about fifty armed men and women burst out of the third floor elevators to raid our office in Princeton, New Jersey. They were from the IRS, the FBI, and the postal authorities. Our employees were searched before they were free to leave the building. They were not allowed to return. The invaders impounded several hundred boxes of books and records, including Rolodexes. They dug through contents of wastebaskets and crawled through the ceiling spaces. It went on into the early-morning hours of the next day."</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>...explains clearly the overreach of power of the State--even in the 1980s, long before the current era of today's postmodern adminstrative state tyranny! You have to have backups of all your documentation, you can't leave anything valuable around that the Feds will take and then "lose" and so on.</b> Another mistake Thorp's firm made was they had old audio tapes from the brokers' recorded lines that they failed to erase (it's standard to erase these once the trade settles, usually they're kept for just a few days after they're recorded).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">205ff The story of the tapes leads to another story of a conflict they had with a Japanese brokerage firm that tried to screw them: it looks a lot like and analogy for how Vegas casinos screw successful blackjack players. Basically this brokerage firm refused to settle an error that <i>they</i> made, and if Thorp's firm sued they would refuse to do business with them... and they knew that the <i>entire Japanese brokerage industry</i> would therefore not do business with him either, thus then they wouldn't be able to do any of their transactions in Japanese-domiciled warrants and converts.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">206ff Giuliani pulls out all the stops that prosecutors use: they subpoenaed Thorp's limited partners [!!!] (although it was never clear for what) just to disturb and upset his firm. Ultimately no one called any of the limited partners to testify, it was a bluff. Examples here also of the government and Giuliani's prosecution team withholding evidence from those they were attacking, extensive legal costs, other disruptions to his business because of this prosecution; he decided he had to wind down his firm and the partnership. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">207ff The legal fees for his own guys were between $10 and $20 million, they ended up getting convicted under RICO statutes, but then some of the convictions were thrown out by an appeals court after the DOJ decided to rein in racketeering cases; later a judge vacated many of the fines and prison terms.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>209ff Interesting take here from Thorp on the whole Drexel/Milken prosecutions and who the real powers were behind it and what really happened; his take on it is not wrong! Giuliani was hoping to be like Thomas E. Dewey, who used prosecutions of bootleggers to get to the Governorship of New York (and almost to the presidency); [see of course Elliott Spitzer, who used the same gambit to actually get to the governorship, until he was outed as "client number nine"].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">211ff Thorp cites Citadel Investment Group, saying that had he not shut down his firm due to pressure from Giuliani that his firm could have been the same size at Citadel. Note also Thorp was Citadel's first limited partner! He decides to shut down the firm for good and finds places for his good people at firms like D.E. Shaw.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 17: Period of Adjustment</b></div><div dir="auto">213 On recognizing you have "enough" and spending time living.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">213ff Thorp discovers Bernie Madoff's fraud way back in 1991! He was retained by a "well-known" consulting firm to review their hedge fund investments; he does all the right things to find out: he goes to meet the firm (they won't let him in the door), he learns the accountant and auditing firm is a friend of Madoff (huge red flag) and also is a one-man shop (gigantic red flag), and then he analyzes the consulting firm's statements to get a transaction record and <i>determines that many of the trades never actually happened</i>; he sees the smoke and concludes that Madoff's firm was fraudulent. <b>[This is standard due diligence, all firms should do this, but as we saw from the firms who invested with Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda, not everybody does their proper due diligence].</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>215 Notice the rhetoric that Thorp has to use with this client to convince them to pull their money from Madoff: the client argues that if Thorp is wrong he would sacrifice his best investment, while Thorp says basically "I have proven from public records that trades never happened" and likewise that if he ignored this his job would be at risk. That latter comment was what was persuasive, <i>that is what is always persuasive unfortunately</i>. People don't get it unless they see their job at risk or their reputation at risk in a tangible, visible, salient way.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>216 The SEC looks like a bunch of clowns here, <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-fourth-turning-is-here-by-neil-howe.html" target="_blank">a total Fourth Turning-caliber institution</a>, they slept on many, <i>many</i> warnings and obvious clues. Note that under Gary Gensler, the SEC might be even worse today than ever.</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">219 Thorp also rethinks the nature of giving opinions to people when he had warned another guy about Madoff but he didn't listen. [I see this rethinking happening in my <i>own</i> head with the people I have (unsuccessfully) tried to warn away from the novel mRNA therapies.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">220 Dialing things back a little bit, Thorp talks about Bruce Kovner, who he met back in the 1980s; <b>they formed a partnership to buy an oil tanker when they were in huge oversupply: they got an older tanker for about scrap value, looking at it as a type of free option; a few years later it was shipping oil, this partnership owned the ship <i>Empress Des Mers</i> and produced a 30% annualized return for nearly 20 years and was ultimately scrapped in 2004 for 23 million "far more than her purchase price of $6 million." [Note that these ships now cost $100 million dollars, double-hulled, using low-sulfur fuel, etc. Tankers can crush you if you are in the wrong part of the cycle, but they might make you wealthy in the right part of the cycle...]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">221ff Interesting examples here of the foolishness of haggling over prices for real estate and businesses and alienating the counterparty with in-your-face tactics.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">224 On "satisficing" versus maximizing; <b>also the "secretary problem" or the "marriage problem" in mathematics: "Assume you will interview a series of people, from which you will choose one. Further, you must consider them one at a time, and having once rejected someone, you cannot reconsider. The optimal strategy is to wait until you have seen about 37 percent of the prospects, then choose the next one you see who is better than anybody among this first 37 percent that you passed over. If no one is better you are stuck with the last person on the list."</b> Thorp actually gave a talk on this back during his PhD studies and he called the title "What Every Young Girl Should Know" and tbe auditorium was packed!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 18: Swindles and Hazards</b></div><div dir="auto">226 "...bigger stakes attracted bigger thieves." On Wall Street being even dirtier than the casino industry.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">229 The author justly criticizes EMH in light of scandals and scams; and then reveals a fascinating example of the embarrassing emotional incontinence of Eugene Fama, the father of the theory.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">230 On high frequency trading; HFT traders basically get an early look at order flow by a few milliseconds and can front-run it, this is sort of like a sandwich attack in cryptocurrency.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">231 Also pointing out most fluctuations in the stock market don't have "reasons" as typically claimed by financial media, most stock market moves are statistical noise.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 19: Buying Low, Selling High</b></div><div dir="auto">233ff On his statistical arbitrage program which started in 1992 and has been running for eight years (now it's 2000 in the narrative here). Whenever any company has some unexpected announcement, a merger or news, he tells the computer to put the stock on a restricted list to close it out or don't initiate a new position. Also interesting that they're paying 0.16 cents per share for commissions (even though this is in the waning days of nickel-a-share institutional trading in those days). Note that the volumes these guys are running through the brokers is huge, something like $54 billion of trading volume a year. [!!] Basically this is like card counting but on a much larger scale.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>***236 A good example of avoiding academic/ludic laziness here: instead of asking "is the market efficient?" Thorp rather asks "in what ways and to what extent is the market inefficient and how can we exploit this?" The lazy academic would just say the market is efficient, he wouldn't "check for himself" and see.</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">237 Their initial indicator was a type of mean reversion in stock prices, stocks that went up a lot over a recent period would do worse in the following period and vice versa; "most up" and "most down" heuristics; see also Gerry Bamberger at Morgan Stanley who developed something similar in the 1980s: his boss took credit for his work, so he resigned...and Thorp hired him.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">240 Note that all these models gradually fail, the returns get exploited away or they wane somehow. Morgan Stanley expands their exposure to this statistical arbitrage and allegedly loses money starting in the late '80s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">240 D.E. Shaw appears here as well, he and Thorp's company almost put together an investment firm but Thorp decided that he already had a good enough stat-arb product on his own. Shaw went on to start his firm, and also hired Jeff Bezos before he left to start Amazon.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">241 Interesting also on his decision <a href="http://casualkitchen.blogspot.com/2012/06/ymoyl-chapter-6-valuing-your-life.html" target="_blank">to "enough" and cut back his activity</a>, reduce the complexity of his organization, wind it down, only do investing that can be done with a small staff, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">241 Also a blurb here about Morgan Stanley: no one at Morgan Stanley even <i>knew</i> who started statistical arbitrage at their firm: the name Jerry Bamberger was completely erased from their organizational memory. <b>[But don't worry, your corporation really, really <i>cares</i> about you and your family!!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">243 I really admire his sense of fiduciary duty to his co-investors in his funds, something you don't often see with hedge funds.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">243 Also see Thorp's take on Long-Term Capital: he saw the magic behind stat-arb positions being liquidated because they were liquid and easily sold in a situation of "sell the good to fund the bad." <a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/08/adaptive-markets-by-andrew-w-lo.html" target="_blank">In stark contrast with Andrew Lo</a>, Thorp, as an "applied academic" could tell right away that it was likely a liquidation when the stock market moved erratically.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">244 Note also that he's running a very lean fund with six people, yet running $400 million with really good performance in his fund, Ridgeline Partners. He closes this fund down in 2002 after ten great years of performance, as he notices returns declining as others start to pour money into similar strategies. Once again he recognizes the value of "enough."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 20: Backing the Truck Up to the Banks</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>246ff This chapter is about the mutual savings and loan association banks that underwent conversions to publicly traded entities starting in the 1990s, the so-called "thrift conversions."</b> "The depositors owned the association 'mutually,' which meant that the business value that built up during operation was also 'owned' by the depositors. As time passed, depositors came and went, but upon leaving they left their share of the business behind. No mechanism existed for extracting this value." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">247ff Describing the mechanics of the process, also the various agency problems as depositors had priority for getting IPO shares but the insiders, officers directors and employees had even <i>more</i> priority, which let them capture some of the depositor's value, this is also an incentive for management to decide to convert to a publicly traded entity in the first place.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">248ff Once you get your allotment of shares, you can flip for a 10-25% (and sometimes 50%) profit in the short run, or you can hold and let the company earn even more proceeds off of the new influx of capital.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>249 "I visualized opening accounts as planting acorns in the hope of getting a crop of oak trees. Only these were strange acorns. They could lie dormant for months or years, perhaps forever; but once in a while, at random, a mighty tree of money would explode out of the ground. Was this 'farm' worth operating?"</b> Here he goes through a discussion of opportunity cost; the foregone interest or returns on money deposited at these institutions; the fact that other people would participate alongside them and capture some of these gains as well; there were costs to go to all these individual banks to make deposits; also administrative and bandwidth costs as well--all things worth thinking about for sure when it comes to making an idiosyncratic investment like this!</div><div dir="auto">DONE TO HERE</div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 21: One Last Puff</b></div><div dir="auto">251ff This chapter discusses his investment in Berkshire Hathaway which did extremely well. You only invested or we heard of Berkshire Hathaway in 1983 which had gone already from 42 to 900., Thorp bought his first shares at 982.50</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">252ff he comments on the frustrating behavior of many people who he talked about the stock too, I know the feeling.!!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">254ff: he does a good job summarizing the business and a few paragraphs. Awesome building the edge that Buffett has diminishing as Berkshire Hathaway grows higher and higher.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">257: the benefits of talking to hedge fund managers where Thorp invest his money you get some new ideas this way</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 22: Hedging Your Bets</b></div><div dir="auto">258ff: on the hedge fund industry, these structure, how it turns our poor and declining and probably have been overstated in the past because of survivor bias and reporting bias, etc; also different categories and genres of hedge funds, other techniques used to salt returns like a startup periodhere they stuff the fund while it's small with hot IPOs that skew the results massively positively, also cherry picking where a fun manager puts his best ideas into his own assets and leaves the second best for his fund, charging expenses to the partnership, ETC.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">265ff: he was offered a chance to invest in ltcm but declined because he thought John Meriwether was too big a risk taker and the theorists behind the partnership were lacking in Street smarts, they were two academic. Note also that Meriwether blew up all over again with a fun that he started after, in 2008 he was down 42% and closed his fund in 2009, and then he started yet another fund in 2010 all while retaining his teaching position at Harvard. Myron scholes also started a new fund later.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 23: How Rich Is Rich?</b></div><div dir="auto">267ff Prosaic musings here on wealth tiers, what a million dollars is worth, saving and investing, ideas for getting wealthy and having your own balance sheet different personal finance tips, etc, also on liquidity costs and losses from transactions if you try to sell say art that you own or an expensive car, etc, they're apparent wealth is not their actual wealth when you liquidate.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 24: Compound Growth: The Eighth Wonder of the World</b></div><div dir="auto">277ff: more useful but also prosaic personal finance advice here, I'm using story of 51-year-old IRS estate auditor Anne Scheiber, 23 years working for the US government retired in 1944 and put her savings of $5,000 into the stock market, living frugally and reinvesting or dividends she died in 1995 at age 101 with 22 million dollar estate; other examples of compounding that are typically used to stagger the imagination like human population, etc; Rule of 72; thoughts on the comparative value of time money and health, proper use of your time; balancing the cost of living with commuting time and thinking of it in terms of a value per hour, also offset by the cost of vehicle etc. thinking the cost of watching television as junk time that's wasted; another fucking reference to the marshmallow experiment</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 25: Beat Most Investors By Indexing</b></div><div dir="auto">282ff [Most of this chapter has been better explained in any of Jack Bogle's books about the mutual fund industry.] Bill Sharpe getting Thorp to think about the fact that everybody's holdings in aggregate replicates the index; on trading costs, market impact costs, <b>Buffett calls those who pay these costs "helpers" for those who index or buy and hold.</b> On tax costs when you sell. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>***287 Also note the idea of how mutual fund gains/losses are distributed late in the year: you can "harvest" this by buying a loss-making fund just before the distribution/loss announcement, get the taxable "loss" and yet miss the losses themselves. [!!!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 26: Can You Beat the Market? Should You Try?</b></div><div dir="auto">290ff "What appears random for one state of knowledge may not be if we are given more information." Knowing about what cards have come out of a deck, or knowing that stock prices may not be random as many think. Criticisms of EMH: it's not really a theory so much as a description of reality that isn't even that good, and there's plenty of instances where it fails.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">292ff On investing in closed-end funds at prices well below NAV; also noting that EMH does not explain closed-end fund discounts fluctuating: SPAC arbs based on timing/closure; the 3Com and Palm arb: note here that there weren't enough Palm shares to short to really put on this hedge fully.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">298ff: Addressing the claims of the EMH hypothesis one by one:</div><div dir="auto">1) "Information is instantly available to many": in reality it's available to a few at first and then spreads, sometimes taking minutes, sometimes taking months, the first people to act on the information capture the gains.</div><div dir="auto">2) "Participants are rational": in reality we are financially rational only in limited ways.</div><div dir="auto">3) "Participants instantly evaluate all relevant information and determine fair prices of securities": in reality we only have some of the relevant information and there's a spectrum of processing and analyzing ability across investors.</div><div dir="auto">4) "New information causes prices to adjust immediately"; in reality price adjustments happen over minutes, hours or months [and can be recursive themselves!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 27: Asset Allocation and Wealth Management</b></div><div dir="auto">302ff A list of major asset classes and subclasses; warnings about chasing results/chasing returns and how costly it can be; on drawdowns: "Many investors do not want the level of risk involved in common stocks or real estate, where the high overall returns are interrupted by savage reductions in wealth." On the costly preference for realized income (dividends and interest) rather than total returns, which includes capital gains (much more tax efficient, tax only when realized, etc, but which feels less real to people).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>305ff Looking at the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 in terms of a flipped fraction, the earnings yield, E/P expressed as a percentage (thus a 20 PE is a 5% earnings yield) and comparing that to benchmark bond yields and then rebalancing accordingly.</b> Avoiding story stocks, or at the least avoiding the valuation premium that comes with story stocks. Eras in which the US stock market has done well versus poorly, see the 1970s versus the post-1987 boom. Noting that most real estate in the form of your home you live in tends to appreciate at low rates, slightly more than inflation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">307ff <b>On stocks and how they allow tax law selling as well as tax gain deferral.</b> Also the long-term capital gains rate is much lower than short-term gains rates. Thus if you have a profit in a stock, wait a year, but if you have losses you can recognize those right away--they're more valuable than long-term losses.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">***308ff Comments here on lack of liquidity for hedge fund investments, Thorp realized in 2008 many repercussions of the great financial crisis, and so he issued partial withdrawal notices to several hedge funds in which he was invested; <b>it's interesting here that he got shaken out at the bottom because these funds paid out after the notification period which was at much lower prices</b>. "Because you can't get out in time when trouble is coming, the excess returns you expect from illiquid investments may be offset by the economic impact of unforeseen future events."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">310ff Back to the Kelly Criterion for bet sizing; avoiding ruin; although note that strict Kelly Criterion rules can lead to wide swings in wealth; also in the real world you're not going to exactly know the probabilities of payoffs nor the payoffs themselves when it comes to equity investments (like you would for a blackjack hand), the system works much better in known payoff games like casino games; taking advantage of times where you have a genuine edge.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">311ff On safe withdrawal rates/spend rates: Thorp considers a 2% withdrawal rate as a limit.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 28: Giving Back</b></div><div dir="auto">313ff Thorp and his wife structure an endowment of a mathematics chair at UC Irvine; he goes through how he specifies all the stuff to keep the University from straying from the point of his bequest! They donated appreciated class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">315 Interesting side point here on the durability of universities: since 1520 only 85 institutions have remained continuously in existence, 70 of them are universities. [Quite interesting. I wonder about the survivor bias or other possible illusions behind this statement?]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">316ff Sidebar here on Bill Gross; his car accident, his discovery of the book <i>Beat the Dealer</i> and his time spent in Vegas practicing the techniques, how it set the stage for his investing career, his first job at Pacific Mutual and then co-founding PIMCO, then he and Thorp as well as some others funded a stem cell research facility in California. <b>[Notably here there is absolutely no mention of Bill Gross's later controversies which were well known by the time this book came out, and include some hilarious and embarrassing allegations of him contaminating his wife's house with canisters of "fart smell"--yes this actually happened--his wife, an amateur painter, painting a copy of a jointly-owned Picasso and putting the copy in his house, and various other sordid things that came out of their vicious divorce conflict.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 29: Financial Crises: Lessons Not Learned</b></div><div dir="auto">319ff Comparing leverage used in the stock market in the 1920s with leverage used in the housing market in the 2000s. Then a review of the lead-up to the great financial crisis, something that is better explained in the book <i>The Big Short</i> and certainly more <i>entertainingly</i> explained in the movie <i>The Big Short</i>. Then a discussion of some of the instruments used in real estate like CMOs, CDOs and CDS. On CMO risks, Thorp properly notes the dual risks of prepayment rates as well as default rates.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">328ff On AIG structuring credit default swaps in a subsidiary without collateral.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">333ff Agency problems with modern corporate CEOs; on management extracting more value than they deserve; surrounded by chosen self-prepatuating boards of directors; super-voting shares, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 30: Thoughts</b></div><div dir="auto">335ff On the value of education, being self-taught/an autodidact; on the importance of understanding probability and statistics; Thorp teaches the treasurer of his homeowners association the idea of laddering treasury bills held in the HOA capital fund; thoughts and ideas about the complexity of the tax code and his solutions.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b></div><div dir="auto">***William Poundstone: <i>Fortune's Formula</i></div><div dir="auto">***Connie Bruck: <i>Master of the Game</i></div><div dir="auto">Mark Stuart: <i>Gangster #2</i></div><div dir="auto">Ed Thorp: <i>Beat the Dealer</i> </div><div dir="auto">Ed Thorp and Sheen Kassouf: <i>Beat the Market</i> </div><div dir="auto">Mickey McDougall: <i>Danger in the Cards</i></div><div dir="auto">Russell Barnhart: see his several books on gambling</div><div dir="auto">Agnes Keith: <i>Three Came Home: A Woman's Ordeal in a Japanese Prison Camp</i></div><div dir="auto">Eric Morris: <i>Corregidor: The American Alamo of World War II</i></div><div dir="auto">Joseph Bulgatz: <i>Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars and Other Extraordinary Popular Delusions</i></div></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89075456428343022.post-79814719902562993952023-11-17T04:57:00.000-08:002023-12-12T11:43:28.269-08:00The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe<div style="text-align: left;"><div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">If you've read <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-fourth-turning-by-neil-howe-and.html" target="_blank">the original <i>The Fourth Turning</i></a>, much of this book will be review. However, this book explains the Forth Turning framework more cogently and tightly than the original, so if you <i>haven't</i> read the original book, I recommend just reading this and skipping the original. You'll walk away with the same central ideas plus the author's additional new (and slightly-adjusted) conclusions.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">The most profound takeaway from the overall Fourth Turning paradigm is that it teaches you to remember your place in the grand scheme of things. Sadly, modernity teaches the exact opposite: it persuades us to think we humans are bigger than history, that we can ignore it, be oblivious to it, and yet not repeat it. Worst of all, modernity teaches us to believe we've somehow managed to defeat history with our SOYANCE!!! and tEcHNologY--ironically none of which we can understand, replicate or repair. These "modren" beliefs, as arrogant and wrong as they are, conflict deeply with the ancients who, much wiser than we, recognized that history has cycles, and we are part of something much, much bigger than ourselves, than our generation, even our civilization.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Once you remember your place, once you realize you (and your society) are a lot smaller and a lot less powerful than you thought, you experience a sort of freeing humility. And this lets you learn an even more important maxim from the ancients: our role might be small, <i>but we still must fulfill it with honor and dignity.</i> Thinking this way lets you ignore all the fearporn and propaganda shoveled onto us every day, and understand what matters--what's in our circle of control and what isn't. It puts things in much-needed perspective.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">One criticism. The author <i>really</i> wants to draw parallels between today and World War II. He argues that because the crisis of that era "galvanized" us and lifted us to new highs as a nation, the <i>next</i> crisis (the one we're in the middle of right now) will do the same. He could be right and I hope so. But it feels to me that what's different today--and the reason we're unable to galvanize ourselves--is that we can't see our enemy like we could in World War II. Today, the enemy is <i>us</i>, our own State, which divides us, censors us, represses us, inflates our money, surveils us and propagandizes us like never before.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">Finally, this book also gives you a second-order benefit of learning historiography: the history of the study of history. The author explains different historical paradigms from different historians with depth and breadth. It sent me <a href="https://amzn.to/3ukQAH4" target="_blank">all the way back to learning about Herotodus</a>!<b>[*]</b> It's an excellent, unexpected side-benefit to the book.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[*]</b> Yes, that's an affiliate link. It is a great, great course. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><i>[As usual, please read no further unless your time is genuinely worthless to you. What follows are just my notes to the text.]</i></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div></div><div dir="auto"><b>Notes:</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Preface:</b></div><div dir="auto">The author expects the next First Turning to be about a decade from now (thus the early 2030s, give or take); that we're about midway through our Fourth Turning right now [and note that the periodicity is off for this cycle if you look at a strict interpretation of the prior book: it should have already happened, or we should already be well into a First Turning by now].</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 1: Winter Is Here</b></div><div dir="auto">1 The financial crisis, the rise of populism, and the pandemic, all hitting at the same time; revealing that America is collapsing; note that a healthy democracy could have withstood all three of these [and the subtext being that our unhealthy democracy--if it can even be described that way--won't]. "...the recent collapse has exposed our aging republic's staggering incompetence at carrying out even basic tasks."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">3 The rise of free-floating anger in public venues.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">4ff "...younger workers are losing hope of upward generational mobility"; they seek security, they are "souring on democracy" and were "raised amid declining abundance."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">6ff The balkanization of American culture into identity categories: gender, religion, education, political party, we now are "canceling or censoring outsiders." I don't think the author quite understands the monoparty system we have nowadays.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">10 The pandemic as a dry run/roadtesting of many American government policies like universal basic income, freezing individual bank accounts, compelling firms to stay open or closed, even government censorship of social media.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">11 "...the old America is disintegrating. But at the same time, America is moving into a phase transition... Welcome to the early and awkward emergence of the next American republic." The author claims that things will become more clear in the mid 2030s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">12-13 Review of the "Turnings": the First Turning is a High (strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, see post World War II USA); the Second Turning is an Awakening (spiritual upheaval, civic order comes under attack from a new values regime, see for example the consciousness revolution of the 1960s with campus revolts etc), the Third Turning is an Unraveling (strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, see the culture wars that began after the Reagan era), the Fourth Turning is Crisis (secular upheaval which propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one, see for example the great financial crisis of 2008 and what's happened since). Four "Turnings" make up a <i>saeculum</i>, roughly a century.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">13ff On the author's taxonomy of generations: the Prophet generation (like the Boomers), the Nomad generation (Gen X), the Hero generation (the Millennials, supposedly), the Artist generation (Silents, or today, Gen Z).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">15 On how generations surprise everybody: nobody expected a totally obedient Silent generation that worked within the system; nobody expected the completely unruly generation of the Boomers; then nobody expected Generation X to scorn the pretensions and be mercenaries in the labor market like they were; and then once the United States got used to edgy and self-reliant youth the Millennials came along with total normcore team-player behavior!</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">16ff Note the repeating cycles: 1840s-1850s: the post-Mexican war and pre-Civil War has similar patterns to the World War I/1920s era of consumerism and jazz age nihilism, replicated in the late 1990s/early 2000s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">18-19 Interesting to think of each Third Turning involving America triumphing over a long-standing global threat: New France after the French and Indian War; Spain/Mexico after the Mexican War; Germany after World War II; but then basically lost its natural cohesion and direction, see also the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. After this the culture wars began raging, civic life became more corrupted, and attitudes toward children became more protective.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">22 The author cites the increasing authoritarianism in the 2010s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>22 "When people start taking on less risk as individuals, they start taking on more risk as groups." [Extremely useful idea right there, a kind of fragility we incur as we seek safety in numbers]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">23ff Schema of a typical Fourth Turning: an early, catalyzing event, a loss of civic trust, galvanizing of partisanship, a rise of creedal passions, all this stuff is already happening... what comes next is some great national challenge or an urgent test or threat, usually a war either between America and foreign powers or a war within America.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">25 The early or mid 2030s will be the beginning of the next First Turning, then by the 2050s there will be a summer season a Second Turning. "But all this takes us far ahead of the central focus of our story, which remains the outcome of winter."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>26ff On the structure of the book:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><b>* "Part One explores our cyclical perspective and explains our method and terminology."</b> (I'm guessing this will be largely review for people who've read <i>The Fourth Turning</i> already) </div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 2: we introduce readers to the modern cycle of seasonal history</div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 3: we look at generations and generational archetypes</div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 4: we delve into other long cycles uncovered by historians in politics, economics, population/demographics, etc</div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 5: we examine the saeculum as a complex social system from the perspective of complexity theory</div><div dir="auto"><b>"Part Two covers what can be expected to happen over the next decade or so."</b></div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 6: a survey of the history and chronology of earlier Fourth Turnings</div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 7: we look at the current Fourth Turning, the Millennial Crisis </div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 8: the dramatic changes in social mood and direction we are likely to see in the years to come</div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 9: we view the decade through the eyes of each generation experiencing it, and which scripts are awaiting which generation by the late 2020s</div><div dir="auto"><b>"Part Three pushes further ahead in time, pass the winter and into the spring season of the saeculum."</b></div><div dir="auto">* Chapter 10: speculates on how America will change during the first turning and how each generation will handle it, </div><div dir="auto">* Epilogue: we reflect on basic lessons from the seasons of history.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">27 On the flaws of looking at history and events in a unidirectional or "progressive" way (here meaning that history "progresses/improves" not "progressive" in the political ideology sense). Looking at history as <i>cyclical</i> has been more of a traditional way to look at history and also more predictive. <b>"One important lesson we will draw from this recounting is that civilization began to behave in a recognizably cyclical pattern precisely when civilization began to assume that history should be understood as progressive."</b> [Well put]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">30ff Interesting thoughts here on the implications of these various ways of thinking about history and time: cyclical time implies that we won't have anything any better or different from our ancestors, it leaves "little room for what we think of as originality, creativity, and progress." Also: using a linear time or directional history lens, which began as an arcane idea in medieval Europe originally, then became widely spread during the Reformation and thereafter, culminating in 18th and 19th century beliefs in "indefinite scientific, economic, and political improvement," and then manifested in its apogee with the United States. <b>"Along the way, linear time's signal achievement has been the suppression of cyclical time."</b> [Basically we forgot our history, just like we forgot our true nature in the ayurvedic idea of presence and true awareness.]; See also parallels with Western Reformation preachers talking about "progress" from innocence to wickedness to redemption ultimately reaching an apocalypse; this parallels well with the 21st century where we talk about "the end of history," the singularity, transhumanism, all through lens of (allegedly) progress. <b>[One could also argue that this is hubris, that it's a civilizational Tower of Babel]</b>; Interesting idea here where the author talks about how "progress" simply generates a proliferation of entirely new cycles--like business cycles, news cycles, electoral cycles, fashion cycles, building cycles, crime cycles., where none of these things were known to the ancients. Also, the modern view of linear time causes us to abandon many habits of natural adjustment. <b>For moderns "the concept of a long-term cycle of history is unfamiliar and exotic."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part One: Seasons of History</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 2: Seasons of Time</b></div><div dir="auto">* Derivation of the word <i>saeculum</i>, a long human life of around 100 years, originally from Etruscan civilization, used by the Romans. The concept entered Western culture around the Renaissance and when Columbus was voyaging, basically the idea of a century.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">45 See Quincy Wright, historian at the University of Chicago, who started to see recognizable patterns in history; see his book <i>A Study of War,</i> where he talks about war in 50-year oscillations. <b>"The warrior does not wish to fight again himself and prejudices his son against war, but the grandsons are taught to think of war as romantic."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">46 Corroborated also by Arnold Toynbee's <i>A Study of History</i>, "best known for its grand theory of the rise and fall of civilizations." He saw cycles initiated by decisive conflicts of each century; Italian wars of 1494-1525, Philip II's imperial wars of 1568-1609: The War of Spanish Succession 1672-1713; French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars 1792-1815; and then World Wars 1 and II in 1914 and 1945. He also noted similar cycles in Chinese and Hellenistic history with a "surprising degree of coincidence" of 95-year cycles.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>47 Toynbee also recognized that "grandsons forget":</b> "The psychological resistance to any move toward the breaking of a peace that the living memory of a previous war has made so precious is likely to be prohibitively strong until the new generation that knows war only by hearsay has had time to grow up and to come into power."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>47ff Other historians who worked on these cycle ideas:</b> L.L. Farrar, Richard Rosencrance, Terrence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, George Modelski and William R Thompson, etc. (See photo)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRAWdAjWmqopC9MktKLE9bJCiCJSJ1gRdCOWok-9o-fe8GzhKLuPQHY4AQHXlDt0-u6YXk5xXd6HhyCnfBFOVHSEldfKQET90Rb6wuy7ZsU1F4_4ePJEBZWM_mKh5FQZi99snopuYihVwhx8d0M6DCp2iZN8nv7QtmwcM2KDHtNyAT47PLMgTeboKgd5fh/s3351/IMG_20230810_122516345.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2510" data-original-width="3351" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRAWdAjWmqopC9MktKLE9bJCiCJSJ1gRdCOWok-9o-fe8GzhKLuPQHY4AQHXlDt0-u6YXk5xXd6HhyCnfBFOVHSEldfKQET90Rb6wuy7ZsU1F4_4ePJEBZWM_mKh5FQZi99snopuYihVwhx8d0M6DCp2iZN8nv7QtmwcM2KDHtNyAT47PLMgTeboKgd5fh/w640-h480/IMG_20230810_122516345.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>57 Anglo American crises: "The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next."</b></div><div dir="auto">* The War of the Roses 1455-1487 (England evolves from a medieval kingdom to a monarchical nation state as Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in battle)</div><div dir="auto">* The Armada crisis 1569-1597 (England defeats Spain and emerges as a commercial power)</div><div dir="auto">* The Glorious Revolution crisis 1675-1706 (the Colonies emerge as a cohesive society after the French and Indian War/9 Years War conflict between England and France)</div><div dir="auto">* The American Revolution crisis 1773-1794 (conflict with England followed by gradual stability achieved in the United States with a new government)</div><div dir="auto">* The Civil War crisis 1860-1865 (unifies--by force--the United States as an industrialized power)</div><div dir="auto">* The Great Depression and World War II crisis 1929-1946 (the US emerges as a global superpower)</div><div dir="auto">* The Millennial crisis 2008-2033? </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>60 Anglo American awakenings: The Awakening is the other side of the crisis, think of it like the marker of the midpoint of a cycle.</b></div><div dir="auto">* The Reformation 1525-1551</div><div dir="auto">* The Puritan era 1621-1649</div><div dir="auto">* The Great Awakening 1727-1746 (Jonathan Edwards)</div><div dir="auto">* The Transcendental Awakening 1822-1844 (Denmark Vesey's slave revolt, Nat Turner's rebellion, Jacksonian Democracy, Transcendentalism as well as a wide range of new religious sects: Mormons, Adventists, Christian Scientists, etc.)</div><div dir="auto">* The Third Great Awakening 1886-1908 (student missionary movement, agrarian protests, Chicago Haymarket riot, William Jennings Bryant running for president, etc.)</div><div dir="auto">* The Consciousness Revolution 1964-1984 (Boomers running amok, Vietnam protests, etc.)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 3: Seasons of Life</b></div><div dir="auto">68 Ibn Khaldun, 15th century Muslim historian and traveler from Spain who wrote the <i>Muqaddimah (Introduction to History)</i> with an original and theory unifying politics, sociology, economics and history and noting the cyclicality of history. <b>"The first generation founds and builds, the second generation imitates the elders and improves on their foundations, the third generation loses contact with the founders and the dynasty begins to decline, the fourth generation doesn't care about the dynasty and may even despise the founders. These are the destroyers who preside over the dynasty's collapse."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">70ff On how different generations, people of different ages, will respond to the same phenomenon in different ways; the best example here is World War II and how it left a massive imprint on everyone, but people at different ages responded differently and played different roles, like "breeding caution and sensitivity" among Silent children, creating the GI Generation as leaders, the so-called "ask not" generation, etc.; and then generations born afterward had a symbolic memory of World War II "but with dampened echoes", gradually forgetting the "war-era sense of community."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">74 On "great events": how they happen with a generational periodicity; every generation has either a Crisis or an Awakening and will encounter a Crisis and an Awakening at some point across its life cycle.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">76 Each generation also reacts to the generations before and after, and this also shapes later history, while the generation itself is shaped by history at the same time.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">78 In the modern era we celebrate endless generational novelty but reject the idea of a Wheel of Time; the former notion "indulges our expectation of unbounded progress" and the latter notion "undermines that illusion." <b>"In the modern world, each generation of new leaders is trying to escape the imagined shadows of its own parents' errors. The last thing it expects, or wants, is for its own children to try to return to those shadows."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">83 According to German literary historian Julius Peterson, "every generation includes what he called 'directive,' 'directed,' and 'suppressed' members." Directive people set the tone, directed people followed, and the suppressed either withdrew or attacked it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">86 On the "Homelander Generation" which this author names and dates differently from the term Generation Z: there'll be more on this in future chapters.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>87 A 570 year, 24 generation panorama on page 87, across Anglo-American history:</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip0xb-bOKBd9I0VskLC38w_YbdRONS8l8fVlAE5uBRDlnCwlJqeYr1rvGDIUawRhK0tVjS_mFPBSLLhPNUtOuYha1Y0IM8n38HGJsjSN_Oz7dNxC-cRXzR-D8NHILEnn8q2ku9L1_T81u6KA9P0cgCel_FY74uf8hgJuKjmV2DOI-VEZdw9vAy4urltzm3/s3917/IMG_20230815_110216626.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2567" data-original-width="3917" height="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip0xb-bOKBd9I0VskLC38w_YbdRONS8l8fVlAE5uBRDlnCwlJqeYr1rvGDIUawRhK0tVjS_mFPBSLLhPNUtOuYha1Y0IM8n38HGJsjSN_Oz7dNxC-cRXzR-D8NHILEnn8q2ku9L1_T81u6KA9P0cgCel_FY74uf8hgJuKjmV2DOI-VEZdw9vAy4urltzm3/w640-h420/IMG_20230815_110216626.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div>88ff On generational archetypes: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, Artist; what makes archetypes, on myths, Jungian characteristics/personality types, the Greeks in the ancient era, often you'd see characteristics which were oppositional or quaternities; see also the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator; then a discussion of standard narratives like a hero and his ritual elder or prophet, or the young prophet and the old king, etc.; all of these archetypal characters and archetypal stories express the recurring tone of stress and hostility across generations; "these archetypes also embody 'shadow' life cycles that mirror each other in reverse." See how various myths and stories throughout history show these types of intergenerational relationships or conflicts. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>93 See also how grandparent and grandchild generations have an affinity; just as there is tension between parent and child generations. "What these archetypal myths illustrate is this: your generation isn't like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with <i>the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you.</i> Or, put another way: archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves: instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>98 On the four generation cycle: </b></div><div dir="auto"><b>Prophet generation:</b> born in the secular spring, indulged as the opposed Crisis children, ages into detached visionary, elders presiding over the next Crisis</div><div dir="auto"><b>Nomad generation:</b> underprotected children during an Awakening, comes of age as alienated young adults of a post Awakening world; become pragmatic midlife leaders during a Crisis and become tough post-Crisis elders</div><div dir="auto"><b>Hero generation:</b> grows up as protected post-Awakening children, comes of age as teamworking achievers during a Crisis, demonstrates hubris as confident midlifers, ages into powerful elders presiding over the next Awakening</div><div dir="auto"><b>Artist generation:</b> overprotected children during a Crisis, comes of age as sensitive young adults of a post-Crisis world, indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, ages into empathic post-Awakening elders</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">99ff Examples of these cycles in literature and history, see Exodus, the <i>Iliad</i> and <i>Odyssey,</i> see also the history of Polybius.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 4: Seasons of American History</b></div><div dir="auto">105 Origins of the American cycle, beginning with Shakespeare's Elizabethan generation Heroes circa 1600; and the Puritan generation Prophets circa 1640; and the Glorious generation Heroes circa 1690 (which transformed the colonies into a stable society) then Jonathan Edwards' Awakening prophet generation, circa 1740; followed by Jefferson's Republican generation Heroes, circa 1790.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">106 Note that the historical cyclicality of American history originated with its Anglo heritage, the ethnic diversity of the US is of more recent origin; note, however, that cycles of racial unrest have coincided with Awakenings and Prophet generations: see Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, W.E.B du Bois and his resistance to Jim Crow in 1900, also the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">108ff Archetypes in American history:</div><div dir="auto"><b>Prophet archetypes:</b> Jonathan Edwards, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Jennings Bryan, Lincoln, FDR</div><div dir="auto"><b>Nomad archetypes:</b> Stonewall Jackson, George Patton, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant</div><div dir="auto"><b>Hero archetypes:</b> Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan</div><div dir="auto"><b>Artist archetypes:</b> Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Joe Biden</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">112 Turnings in American history: "Like the four seasons of nature, the four turnings of history are equally necessary. Awakenings and Crises are the saecular solstices; Highs and Unravelings are the secular equinoxes."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>112 Good summary of the four turnings here: </b>"When a society moves into an Awakening or Crisis, the new mood announces itself as an unexpected change in social direction. An Awakening begins when events trigger an upheaval in cultural life, a Crisis when the events trigger an upheaval in civic life. An Unraveling or High announces itself as a consolidation of a new direction. An Unraveling begins with the perception that the Awakening has been resolved, leaving a new cultural mindset firmly in place. A High begins when society perceives that the crisis has been resolved, leading a new civic regime firmly in place."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>114: The four turnings as four cycles of growth, fulfillment, entropy, and death/rebirth:</b> </div><div dir="auto">* The High is like the Spring where a society fortifies into an era of promise</div><div dir="auto">* The Awakening is like Summer, a type of euphoria</div><div dir="auto">* The Unraveling is like an Autumn where it consumes itself in an era of unease</div><div dir="auto">* The Crisis is the Winter where there's struggle and sacrifice in an era of survival. </div><div dir="auto"><b>"We keep forgetting that history, like nature, must turn."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">114 <b>First Turning:</b> See the post-World War II American High as a good example of a First Turning: low crime, high national confidence, ordered communities, optimism about the future.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">115 <b>Second Turning:</b> See the Awakening of the '60s and '70s; see the Jacksonian progressiveness (vs the elite favoring the then-Bank of America); see the religious Awakenings along the Erie Canal and during the 1835 era.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">117 <b>Third Turning:</b> See the Unraveling of the culture wars during George W. Bush; see also the temperance and women's suffrage movements after World War I; see also the 80s-era dystopian media with culturally influential movies like Mad Max, Blade Runner, Terminator.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">118 <b>Fourth Turning:</b> there's a sudden Crisis; some threat that is seen as dire, creating a mood of urgency. By the end of the Fourth Turning the mood shifts to exhaustion, relief and pride in what the nation has accomplished.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">122ff Note other "cycle theories": <b>See Arthur Schlessinger, Sr.'s cycle theory of American politics of liberal versus conservative errors</b>, more fleshed out by his son Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who relabel the errors as "public energy" versus "private interest." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">123ff: <b>See also the "party realignment cycle"</b> seen by "a cluster of eminent political scientists" (includes Walter Dean Burnham) which corresponds better with the saeculum: every 40 years or so a new realigning election with a new political party system. See the 1788 Federalist Republican, 1828 Jacksonian Democrat, 1860 Lincoln Republican, 1896 McKinley Republican, 1932 New Deal Democrat, 1968-80 Nixon/Reagan Republican, etc. "...the birth of America's fourth Republic should coincide with the rise of America's seventh party system." <b><a href="https://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-network-state-by-balaji-srinivasan.html" target="_blank">[Note also Balaji Srinivasan and his discussion of political "flippenings" in his book The Network State.]</a></b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">125 <b>Foreign affairs: see Frank Klingberg's historical alternation of moods in American foreign policy, from introversion to extroversion</b>; this matches roughly with the saeculum; during an Awakening or Crisis America becomes introverted; during a High or Unraveling America becomes extroverted. Note that the Civil War Reconstruction era was anomalous.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">128ff <b>Economic cycles, see the K-cycles of Nikolai Kondratieff</b>: during a High, wage and productivity growth is typically smooth and rapid: during an Awakening a soaring economy hits at least one spectacular bust (e.g., the 1870s, mid 1890s, late 1830s) that is interpreted as a closing age of post-war growth; during an Unraveling economic activity again accelerates, but with more speculative booms and busts, and then a financial crash or a spiral of debt deleveraging that helps push the nation into Crisis, see 2008 or 1929.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">130: On the highly anomalous and conspicuous decline of inequality from the 1930s to the 1970s across most of the western world; no also that Awakenings and Unravelings in the United States have been "eras of rising urbanization, commercialization, litigation, international commerce, and rent-seeking."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">132ff: On community, see how social trust indicators peaked in 1962 (per sociologist Robert Putnam), and then by the 1970s everybody knew that this trend had reversed. "In a High, people want to belong; in an Awakening, to defy; in an Unraveling, to separate; in a Crisis, to gather."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">136ff On family and gender: Prophet generations tend to have "norm-breaking women" whereas Hero generations reassert gender polarity; during a High child rearing becomes more indulgent, during an Awakening rules and rules of family and gender are attacked by the rising generation and child rearing becomes <i>under</i>protective, note also that the terms "free love" and "open marriage" were not from the 1960s but from utopian communes of Upstate New York in the 1830s and 40s! "During an Unraveling the family feels endangered and child-rearing becomes more protective." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">138 On demography: Fourth turnings are marked by a fall in the birth rate, Artist generations are typically baby bust generations: see for example today's Generation Z/Homelanders "who are the product of the lowest fertility rate in American history." Prophet generations are typically baby boom generations as every High has been marked by a rise in the birth rate.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">139 On integration, which tends to climb in an Awakening, peak during an Unraveling, then fall during a Crisis; the Unraveling reversal is triggered often by a nativist backlash, see the 1850s, 1920s, 2000s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">140 On social disorder: crime rates rise during Awakenings, peak during Unravelings and fall during a Crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">142ff On religion and culture: oscillation between focus on inner spirit or faith (during an Awakening) and worldly uplift or works (during a Crisis). A metaphorical "shift from the inner to the outer." See also the founding of "countercultural utopian communes" typically in Awakening years, 1840, 1900, 1970; Awakening periods allow for cultural experiments, because the backdrop is sufficiently secure and prosperous; but see during the next Crisis how people migrate from "what does this art say to me?" to "whose side does this art say that I'm on?" Society becomes polarized and policed, see for example today with canceling and doxxing on social media. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">147 "These parallel rhythms--in politics, society, culture--never stop beating. <b>And, so long as we keep extrapolating along straight lines, they never stop taking us by surprise."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 5: Complexity, Anomalies, and Global History</b></div><div dir="auto">148 <i>"There are decades when nothing happens. And there are weeks when decades happen."</i> --Lenin</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">148 On "fox thinking" versus "hedgehog thinking" per the famous quote "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"; "Is it better to organize the world around one central idea? Or to remain open to a plurality of unrelated ideas? Is it better, like the hedgehog, to see all the links between things that seem different? Or, like the fox, to see each thing clearly for what it really is?"</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">149ff On free will and contingency: note that our behavior and that of people around us is more predictable than we might wish it to be, we all make predictions all the time. This "in no way nullifies anybody's freedom." Regarding contingency, note that history is always begetting random accidents and events, the author argues that what matters is not the accidents themselves but society's <i>response</i> to those accidents. See for example if the Depression happened in the 1970s, Boomers would not have "coped with economic depression by cheerfully donning uniforms"; "History always produces sparks. But some sparks flare briefly and then vanish, while others touch off firestorms out of any proportion to the sparks themselves." See for example the history of American reactions to foreign provocations; contrast World War I, which involved very long delays before our involvement versus World War II where the US declared war the next day after Pearl Harbor with only one dissenting vote [<b>DK: this was Jeannette Rankin, congresswoman from Montana; she also voted against entry into WWI]</b>. Note also that some eras feature maximum cooperation between generations (World War II), others feature maximum antagonism between generations (the Vietnam War era).</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">152 On technology, "Every new decade or generation shapes how that technology gets put to use." See the GI Generation with mainframes and centralized decision-making versus the Awakening era Boomers with distributed personal computers. See also how the internet became an instrument of individualization for Generation X but then became an instrument of collectivization, surveillance and orchestrated hysteria in recent years. In other words, technology is exogenous but it just "gives us what we want when we want it," it "tailors itself to the national mood."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">154ff Seasonal history is as a complex system: on simple systems, complicated systems, complex systems, chaotic systems; the patterns and cycles of history are relatively stable and tend to show up regardless of exact starting conditions, like the study of natural cycles. "Even when winter arrives a bit early or late, it is still possible to foretell in what order the leaves will fall, the birds will migrate, and the streams will freeze." On looking at systems as having levels [or maybe the author should describe them as fractals], see for example cells and organs in a body; a society of animals that is self-adjusting or has some sort of self-organization. Likewise a historical saeculum has a balance between order and disorder which is dynamic and self-adjusts.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">158 On modern ideologies of progress: </div><div dir="auto">* The idealist tradition of Hegel which holds that historical processes including cycles of history are guided by God, leading eventually to salvation or perfection </div><div dir="auto">* The materialist tradition, see Ray Kurzweil or [the eugenicist] Yuval Noah Harari, which sees a technocracy or society that remakes nature, even human nature, towards perfection</div><div dir="auto">Note that these schools have similarities: both tend to use alarmism (we have to do something now, we're on the brink, if we do it right we'll be safe forever, etc.), but there are also big differences: one requires individual righteousness or worthiness, the other is collectivist; thus we see two of our generational archetypes here, the Prophet and the Hero, respectively. Note also that enthusiasm for the "inner world" definition of progress peaks at a Second Turning or Awakening, and enthusiasm for the "outer world" collectivist progress peaks at the end of a Fourth Turning or Crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">162ff Cycle length and anomalies: on the wavelength and periodicity of cycles: drivers here include level of living standards; age and nutrition driving puberty age; the 20th century development of the concept of adolescence; intriguingly, generational length shortened to 20 to 21 years in the 20th century down from about 25 years a century or two before; recently it has been expanding again in the last 50 years with a rising marriage age (now at a historic high of 29, gaining 8 years since the 1960s); likewise fertility rates and first childbirth ages are much higher as well. Children are not out-earning their parents and often are living at home, a delayed young adulthood. See also how our political leaders are older than ever, many well into their 80s, which is also unprecedented. Typically we think of history as accelerating but in reality the secular rhythm is actually <i>decelerating</i>.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">166 Chapter 9 will explore late elderhood to show the growing influence of older people; Chapter 8 will explore how the generations and turnings will extend and expand.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">168ff Conspicuous anomalies: the only huge anomaly is the US Civil War, which compressed both a Third and Fourth Turning into only 21 years: this is usually the length of one turning; also it lacked a Hero generation. Given that the three generations of that era, the Artist, Prophet and Nomad generations "comprised a dangerous constellation" accelerating the arrival of a Crisis, forcing it to a quick climax and the most apocalyptic conflict possible, but then Reconstruction collapsed by 1877 and the South entered a one-party government, the authors speculate that "no rising generation came forward to fill the hero role after the Civil War" because "the crisis congealed so early and so violently, most of this generation was still in childhood by the end of the war--and emerged more shell-shocked than empowered." Government emerged weaker than in other post-crisis eras.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">171ff On how are seeing more and more generational patterns like the Anglo-American saeculum in many other countries around the world as well; a sort of "sympathetic resonance" of neighboring countries. See for example the European peace following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815; the Metternich peace in which "six subsequent European generations developed": the Artist generation born in the 1800s that came of age in the 1820s (with "gushy romantic poets" like John Keats as well as Victor Hugo, Franz Schubert), next was the Prophet generation that came of age around 1840: this was the utopian and radical generation that led to the riotous revolutions of 1848 against the Metternich controls of Europe, although they failed almost everywhere, they gave birth to dreams of utopianism, socialism and nationalism. Next was a Nomad archetype that came of age in 1860s: pragmatists and no-nonsense nationalists. Fourth was the Artist archetype coming of age in the 1880s, who professionalized governments, businesses and universities, and included Freud, Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde, the 19th century's "most sexually repressed generation" leading the Edwardian era and also leading Europe disastrously into World War I. Fifth was the Prophet archetype which came of age in the early 1900s, avant-garde, affluent, confident radical feminists as well as anarchists and their idealistic dreams were destroyed by the Great War and became the older generation in the 1920s and 1930s. Then the Nomad archetype came of age with World War I, the generation of 1914 or The Lost Generation. They were the disillusioned skeptics of the 20s and made skeptical of democracy itself by the Great Depression (see Kafka and Heidegger); note also here were midlife military officers who ultimately tore the world to pieces: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, de Gaulle Tito, Mao, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">176ff On other parts of the world running in sync with the Anglo-American generations: see also certain parallels with the 1860 Meiji Restoration in Japan; the 1850s and 60s civil War in China; the Sepoy Mutiny in India of 1857; the war of the Triple Alliance in South America in the 1860s (this was between Brazil Argentina and Uruguay on one side in Paraguay on the other, "nearly exterminating the people of Paraguay" [I know literally nothing of this conflict!] and giving rise to decades of oligarchy in Brazil and Argentina with political stability and economic modernization.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">178 Then a clear synchronization of most countries with the Great Depression and World War II. This Crisis area ended in the late 1940s "with a series of global and durable political settlements." With the exception of Russia (which had a 30-year crisis from 1917 on) this encompassed most of the world, synchronizing the generation clock. On schedule a second turning arrived between the 1960s and 1980s where idealistic youth attacked a repressive establishment; the 1960s youth protests in the United States had analogies elsewhere. Thus we have with minor differences in timing six global generations beginning in the early 1900s with the birth of the GI Generation (Hero), the Silent Generation (Artist) born from the 1920s to the 1940s, then the 1940s to 1960s global baby boom generation (Prophet), then the global Xer Generation (Nomad), born from the '60s to the 80s; and then a global Millennial generation, "possibly Hero" [--rather faint praise from the author here!] born from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">180 Note also that many Muslim-majority societies of Africa, Turkey, and the greater Middle East did not have the same cycles, and a Muslim Awakening exploded in 1979, raging well past the year 2000, spearheaded by a very young Prophet generation. More on global convergence in Chapter 7.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part Two: Climax of Winter</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 6: A Winter Chronology</b></div><div dir="auto">185 On how World War II "galvanized" the United States. <b>[Re my comments in the introductory essay to this post: it really feels like what's different today, and the reason we're unable to "galvanize," is that we can't really <i>see</i> our enemy like we could in World War II, or we don't <i>want</i> to see that the enemy is ourselves, the very State which we put into power, that is censoring us, repressing us, making us deal with government-created problems like inflation, medical tyranny, surveillance. Instead of galvanizing us against our common enemy: the monoparty administrative state, everyone in the country believes <i>it's the other guy's party</i> that's causing all the problems, and thus the monoparty system stays entrenched and keeps us all the more divided.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">186 The author notes that as much as everyone has warm memories of what we could do, Fourth Turnings are also a time of brutal and "lethal forms of social reconstruction." We have a fond and selective memory of what happened in past turnings like WWII.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>186 "A Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order remains low--though the demand for order is now steeply rising. It is the saeculum's hibernal, its time of trial."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>187-8 The <i>ekpyrosis</i>, "nature's fiery moment of death and discontinuity" the combustion of the old saeculum and the birth of the new. The destruction of old institutions, but giving birth to new ones, Vishnu yields to Shiva, this is how a society "reverses entropy."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">188 We are now on the seventh of the Fourth Turnings, this is a typical chronology:</div><div dir="auto">* A precursor event that temporarily galvanizes the society</div><div dir="auto">* A catalyst: a watershed event that produces a sudden but lasting shift in the social mood</div><div dir="auto">* Once catalyzed, a society experiences at least one "regeneracy" though there is usually more than one which reunifies the community</div><div dir="auto">* The regenerated society reaches a "consolidation" when everyone realizes that this new community is struggling for survival</div><div dir="auto">* The consolidated society propels toward a climax, a crucial moment confirming the death of the old order and triumph of the new</div><div dir="auto">* The climax culminates in a resolution, a triumphant or a tragic conclusion, that separates winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">189 Usually it takes around 24 years on average between the starting catalyst and the ultimate resolution; the precursor event could be the 9/11 response, the catalyst could be the Great Financial Crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">193: On past Crisis eras, the author deals with Fourth Turnings in reverse order, working back from the most recent one: </div><div dir="auto"><b>The Great Depression/World War II Crisis (1929-1946);</b> World War I was the "precursor" event; then came the Spanish influenza recessions, a Red scare, and then a consensus view that entering World War I was a "colossal blunder"; Warren Harding won by a landslide in 1920 promising "normalcy"; in the 1920s America felt wild, decadent; then the "catalyst" was the 1929 crash and aftermath; the "regeneracy" was FDR's inauguration address: "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; a second regeneracy happened in 1940 as FDR won a third term and America became "an arsenal of democracy"; the Lend-Lease Act, then the bombing of Pearl Harbor which was the "consolidation"; the "climax" was the turning of the war when the US destroyed Japan's last carriers in the Battle of the Philippines Sea and also completed the breakout from the D-Day landings (this was in June/July 1944) and the outcome of World War II became certain. The resolution was 1945-1946 as the US had its new dominant position in the world.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>201 The Civil War Crisis (1860-1865);</b> Precursor: the Mexican-American War (1846-1848); see also the tremendous polarization from the reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i>, John Brown's raid in Harper's Ferry, also the schisms in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches, all of which split North/South, etc; the "catalyst" was the southern states' reaction to Lincoln's election: spontaneous secession. The "regeneracy" was the attack on Fort Sumter making war a fact; the "consolidation" was the Emancipation Proclamation; the "climax" was Sherman's March to the Sea and the final siege of Petersburg and Richmond, etc; the "resolution" was the ratification of the 13th Amendment and Lee's surrender at Appomattox.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>207 The American Revolution Crisis (1773-1794): </b>Precursor: the French and Indian War (1754-1763); this kindled a sense of pan-colonial unity. Catalyst: Parliament's 1774 Coercive Acts, which catalyzed the colonists' plan of Union; Regeneracy: open hostilities which started with the British raids on Concord and Lexington; Second Regeneracy: the Philadelphia Conference to create a new government to replace the failed Articles of Confederation; Consolidation: the new Constitution divided the United States into two camps those who approved and those who disapproved, consolidating the ultimate debate, Federalists versus Anti-Federalists. Climax: the 13 colonies finally ratify the Constitution in July 1788; Resolution: US prosperity returned with general warfare in Europe after the French post revolution terror.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>213 Glorious Revolution Crisis (1675-1706):</b> This conflict had no precursor and the catalyst and the first regeneracy arrived at almost the same time: Catalyst: King Philip's War (1675-76), which depopulated many towns in New England for more than 30 years, likewise a conflict between the people of Virginia and governor William Berkeley; Second regeneracy: James II succeeding to the English throne and the steward colonial governors of New England were going to strip the colonies of their traditional powers of self-government; Consolidation: Spring 1689 when King James II abdicated in favor of anti-Catholic William of Orange and his wife Mary; popular rebellions broke out in the colonies (a rebellion in Maryland "permanently unseated the unpopular Catholic elite which had dominated that colony since its founding.") Climax: 1691: when the British Crown permitted colonial self-government with limited British appointed governors. Resolution: the British victory at Blenheim and Ramillies (1704 and 1706 respectively) which defeated Louis XIV, thereafter the colonies were much more united and much more self-governing under a firmly Protestant British Empire.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>217 Armada Crisis (1569-1597):</b> Precursor: The five year reign of Mary I, Bloody Mary, a Catholic; Elizabeth succeeded Mary and was more of a compromise between Puritans and Catholics; Catalyst: Catholic uprising of the Duke of Norfolk plus the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth by the Pope, also a the Spanish assassination attempt, as well as other anti-Protestant actions (the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre for example) among others; Regeneracy: the unification of the English Parliament under the threat of the Spanish Catholic Empire, as well as assassination plots from Mary Queen of Scots who was next in line behind Elizabeth; Consolidation: England impounds Spanish ships in her ports, begins raiding the Spanish and sending troops to help the Dutch and Protestant French; also execution of Mary; they knew Spanish invasion was coming; Climax: the arrival and defeat of the Spanish Armada; Resolution: formal piece declared in 1604 between Spain and England after both Elizabeth and Philip II had died.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">220 War of the Roses Crisis (1455-1487): England in these days was corrupt, divided and misruled by Henry VI who was periodically insane, conflict between the house of York (the "white rose") and the House of Lancaster (the "red rose"); Precursor: there was no precursor; Catalyst: open violence in 1455 with the Battle of St Albans, then battles over the next four years; Regeneracy: Lancaster's "Parliament of Devils" condemned the House of York leaders for treason in 1459; York leaders fled England and then returned in an all-out war for the Crown itself; see also the Battle of Towton where one out of every 50 English males between ages 15-50 were killed; also tremendous violence for some 20 years: judicial murder of nobles, expropriation of land, slaughter of royal family members, etc. Richard III declared himself King and then had his nephews (the sons of Edward IV) murdered. Consolidation: new entrance of Henry Tudor of the House of Lancaster who landed in England in 1845; Climax: Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field, the crowning of Henry VII and the joining of the lineages; Resolution: 1487 when Henry the VII puts down the most serious rebellion against his rule, securing and stabilizing the new House of Tudor.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>222 Note that Shakespeare wrote Richard III quite propagandistically, leaving out any of Henry's brutal measures: he was writing under Queen Elizabeth's reign during the secular winter of the Spanish Armada crisis and could not afford to be impartial. Henry the VII of course was Elizabeth's grandfather!</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 7: The Millennial Crisis</b></div><div dir="auto">225 Google Ngram searches; we tend to see the coalescing of tighter communities early in a crisis but this happens at the small "platoon level" initially; There is much less trust in "previously trusted" institutions; </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>226 "We find that America has already experienced the precursor, the catalyst, and the first regeneracy... we speculate on the various ways the Millennial Crisis may climax and resolve in the years to come."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>227ff The Millennial Crisis:</b> a potential roadmap:</div><div dir="auto"><i>Precursor:</i> 9/11 followed by US retaliation</div><div dir="auto"><i>Catalyst:</i> Great Financial Crisis, specifically the market crash of 2008-9</div><div dir="auto"><i>Regeneracy:</i> Trump's election in 2016 against establishment liberal Hillary Clinton, resulting in tremendous partisanship not seen since the 1850s</div><div dir="auto"><i>Second regeneracy:</i> unknown/has not happened yet</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">234 [Interesting insight here]: when there is extreme partisanship and gridlock, <b>both sides will try to eke out economic and political gains with fiscal and monetary stimulus.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">236ff "America is now moving into its seventh party system." On the realignment of the 2016 election, similar to the Nixon/Reagan elections from 1968-1980; also sorting of Americans in terms of where they live geographically, "the big sort" and the "de-purpling" of America. On second-order effects of these changes: they continue to reward more and more extreme views because officeholders know they won't be challenged by the other party, you get fewer moderates.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">240 The author here does not understand what is happening in Ukraine: sadly he holds the "government approved" narrative of what's happening there.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">242 "A new regeneracy does not require new leaders. It requires some important shift in issues along with a rearrangement of the constituencies arrayed on either side."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">242 Universal pessimism about the nation's future [if this is the consensus view then it's time to lean the other way!]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>245ff Interesting paradigm here where people are universally concerned about their standard of living declining and also concerned about international enemies like China and Russia, but at the same time they're happy about their home/family situation, even if it is more modest/less independent than prior eras</b> ("record high satisfaction with how things are going in their personal lives"); supposedly, living together with grandparents, parents and adult children at higher rates than ever, and positive about the experience, and feeling good about their communities. Striking.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">249: On the timing of the <i>ekpyrosis</i>: the consolidation, climax and resolution. The author offers a few ways to triangulate when the Crisis is likely to end. If it began in 2008, the average saeculum is 92 years (although closer to 80 years looking at the last three American saecula), so from the last crisis resolving in 1946 this means somewhere between 2026 and 2038, tightening it down to maybe 2032-2034 given the last couple generations have been longer in terms of life phases; the author predicts 2030 is the most likely year for the climax.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">253ff: The author cites various examples of Americans massacring each other, having wars that are actually both internal/civil and external at the same time: see the patriots vs. loyalists during the American Revolution, the Civil War as the ultimate example of course; then going back to the "Anglo" part of the Anglo-American cycles, you can see the English Civil War as well as well as the sectarian problems throughout. <b>[It really makes you think: we are generally a peaceful people--except when we're not; and when we're not, we're <i>really</i> not peaceful]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">255ff On financial crises as a wild card: examples of prior market crashes, prior deflations and inflations, booms and busts that happened during the Revolution during the Civil War, during the 1930s; you can have one year where stimmies and tax cuts happen, rates are lowered money is created, etc... and then the next year there's price controls and property seizures. These are shocks that will be impossible to predict.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">258 Financial crashes in the context of the ekpyrosis: note that we've had quite a lot of them lately: 2008 2020 and 2022; with a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus and a tremendous increase in debt to GDP and a tremendous amount of growth in the money supply.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">261ff Ekpyrosis and civil war? "The question must be taken seriously. Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely." Note also Henry Adams comments in his memoirs: "Not one man in America wanted the Civil war, or expected or intended it... Not one, however clever or learned, guessed what happened." Nobody predicts civil wars, everyone is surprised by them. <b>[I think you could flip this and presume that because so many are expecting it we probably will NOT have one]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>264 Interesting thought here. "...civil wars (or, alternatively, 'revolutions') begin when one or both sides are persuaded of the irreversibility of future events once the other side gains further advantage.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">265 Note also the second-order effects of a secession, <b>and why no country ever will allow any breakaway movement: all it does is enable other factions to separate too,</b> see for example Lincoln considering "letting the Confederacy secede peacefully, before quickly dismissing the idea basically for this reason."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">266 [Not sure this author has looked at the Partition of India and what happened then to deal with the factional/sectarian issues between Hindu and Muslim peoples leading up to India's independence. Another interesting model would be the breakup of Yugoslavia into Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and other breakaway nations over time.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">267ff Various speculations as to what a new civil war might look like in the United States: this is sort of a useless parlor game to be honest. Also guesstimates is what might happen globally when the United States with its role of global policeman breaks down during a civil war.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">268ff A "great power" war scenario: the China Russia Iran North Korea bloc, [this author doesn't really think of it in terms of BRICS or "global south," he doesn't think of India or Brazil or Africa as major vectors, note that these guys are all "switching teams" away from the United States] </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">271 The author also has (probably) too much belief in the might of the American military right now as well.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>272 The so-called "diversionary war": when leaders launch a war for the "purpose of distracting the public from domestic troubles." Note that Seward actually notoriously [!!] recommended starting a war with Britain, France or Spain to get the Union to rally around the flag and forget about Fort Sumter, this was in the spring of 1861 [!!!]</b> [Of course as I'm writing this right now Israel under Netanyahu might very well have started its own diversionary war to get the Israeli peoples' eyes off Netanyahu's corruption.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">274 It's also interesting that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is already observably over when this book's ink is barely dry; the author talks about it as if the conflict is still in doubt.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 8: How Our Society Will Change</b></div><div dir="auto">275ff See how in the 1770s American colonies were ungovernable, but by the 1790s were surprisingly unified and well organized, even to the point where the government was able to "levy nationwide taxes higher than its citizens had earlier paid as colonists." See also the 1850s, where the US was seething with discontent and division with physical violence on the floor of Congress. But a decade later it was a different country entirely: the Union was in command of the largest army and Navy in the world in the blink of an eye; finally, note the contrast between 1930s-era America and post World War II America.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">278 On the paradox of having an end goal of a stronger community yet using conflict (often deadly organized conflict) as a means to that end. A "paradox of modernity"; <b>an "order-disorder duality"</b>... Larger states means bigger state armies means an "enforcement" of peace (via "internal pacification" in the phrase of sociologist Anthony Giddens) means slack swan wars started by the state that are tremendous in size and scope.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">281 When it's a non-democratic conflict between regimes there are no rules. "Regimes can have lots of procedures, but there is no procedure for choosing <i>between</i> regimes. The essence is captured in the Butch Cassidy victim: when rival rulers choose to have a knife fight, there are no rules."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">282ff A few other notable insights: <b>on the evolutionary biology insight that warlikeness and in-grouping and "othering" outgroups is hardwired into humans</b>; see also the paradox between selfishness and altruism, see the famous quote from David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson <b>"Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups."</b> [!!!] Also the author considers the question "Is war somehow necessary in order to create community solidarity?" which is a question obviously separate from the morality of war. Note also the fascinating factoid that every slave family in America could have been emancipated, with land purchased for them, for a fraction of what both sides spent on the Civil War.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">285ff On William James's interesting paradox of how we love the trials and rights of passage of our lives as well as on a societal basis, <i>but only many years after</i>. We don't <i>want</i> the trials while they're happening. <b>Thus James had a thought experiment about whether we want the United States in his day <i>without</i> the Civil War having happened, but would we welcome another civil war like the one we had?</b> The answer is yes to the first, but no to the second. It's quite interesting to think of war in terms of the tremendous benefits of organizing a community, of having an authoritatively governed team that has a certain permanence and stability, having institutions that have control, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">288ff On forcing the formation of community: the United States in 2008 (as well as 1929 and 1859) was a procedural "rights state" basically just setting ground rules for personal fulfillment, the result was a type of loneliness, isolation, alienation, low social cohesion; note how a major threat or a disaster produces solidarity in a previously disparate alienated group, it makes society tighter; <b>likewise it forces a form of equality on everybody: mechanisms like conscription, rationing, inflation, etc., also the destruction or devaluation of financial assets that happens during a crisis. [Note that the genuinely wealthy aren't really subject to these things].</b> Either way you tend to have a new "civic compact" where the elites will grant the people more voice in governing; often this is to forestall or directly address insurrection or the threat of it; this kind of violence emerges with every Fourth Turning according to the author: see the deadly New York City draft riots during the Civil War, labor violence during the Great Depression; as a result, elites will "grow more attentive to popular grievances." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">288ff Other equality factors: you don't necessarily need to buy things to attain status when you can do it with civic achievement in a crisis; social mobility increases during Crisis periods: geographic mobility surges with people moving with dislocation of wartime service, labor markets tighten thus employee earnings increase, standard social barriers tend to disappear as the society mobilizes all available people (see for example African-Americans during World War II and thereafter), etc. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">297ff On authority, after a Fourth Turning a new regime is usually firmly established and political authority is taken for granted and therefore less noticed; during a Crisis, force is usually abundant, conspicuous and "often excessively applied." See the Revolutionary War leaders executing deserters, see Lincoln being persuaded to burn the South to the ground; the development of the doctrine of total war; see also World War II's internment of Japanese, firebombing of Germany and Japan, etc. <b>[One could add the medical tyranny and censorship regimes of the modern era during this crisis era]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">301ff On how permanence comes from the resolution of a Crisis; certain paradoxes also, like a country may make some of their more durable long-term future commitments when its near-term existence seems most in doubt; see certain examples done during the Great Depression like creating Social Security as a typical example. The country goes from buying off individual special interest groups and not solving <i>any</i> of the great big problems prior to the Crisis to actually having sort of a mandate to tackle major problems during and after the Crisis.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">304 Note that certain generations get the shaft! See for example the Nomad generation usually gets skipped by things like Social Security and Medicare whereas the Artist generation gets these goodies because they follow (generationally speaking) the deeds of the young Hero generation which got these things done. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">305ff On shifting norms during a Crisis and climax; celebrating sacrifice, codes of honor, heroism, propaganda machines producing pro-regime media, etc. Negative stigma for shirkers and rulebreakers, manners, traditional behavior is ritualized, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">309ff Washington Irving's story <i>Rip Van Winkle</i> is a metaphor for what happens across a Crisis era. You wake up and you hear everybody speaking a different language as if you're in a totally new country.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>310 "This rebirth [that accompanies every Fourth Turning] unifies, integrates, and empowers society to a degree that people beforehand would have deemed unthinkable. It also pushes society through a relentless and deadly passage that people beforehand would have deemed unbearable. In this sense, the Fourth Turning is for a society what a right of passage is for an individual. No society ever voluntarily chooses to enter it. And yet, as [William] James conceded, no society ever wishes to reverse it once it is complete."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">311 Note also as a society we doubt we can make it through this passage, in part because no one alive is left from the last time it happened four generations ago [!!]; <b>see this quote from John Adams which communicates it perfectly, just as the American Revolution was beginning. "We have not been fit for the times. We are deficient in genious, education, and travel, fortune--in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety. God grant us wisdom and fortitude."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 9: How Our Lives Will Change</b></div><div dir="auto">313ff "What will it feel like?" What will our personal experience be of what lies ahead? Returning to the concept of generational change; see also the Forth Turning generational constellation: elder Prophets, midlife Nomads, young-adult Heroes, and child Artists; <b>"the archetypal lineup has been one of the great constants of the Anglo-American saeculum."</b></div><div dir="auto"><b>* The indulged Prophet children of the last High</b>, born in the aftermath of the last Crisis, have always fomented the Crisis after entering elderhood. [Boomers]</div><div dir="auto"><b>* The abandoned Nomad children of an Awakening</b> have always become the pragmatic midlife managers of the Crisis. [Gen X]</div><div dir="auto"><b>* The protected Hero children of an Unraveling</b> have always furnished the powerful young adult team players of the Crisis. [Millennials, supposedly]</div><div dir="auto"><b>* The suffocated Artist children of the Crisis</b> have always grown up as the empathic youth who will later come of age in the next High. [Gen Z/Homelanders]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Basically Boomer Prophets take us into this thing; Gen X Nomads resolve to defend society as they die off, rising fiercely and sacrificially to the occasion; Millennial Heroes provide a fulcrum for the turning point and produce leaders through the crisis, like the GIs of World War II; Homelanders/Gen Z is supposed to be the compliant, well-behaved generation to stay out of harm's way]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">318 "We proceed from the oldest living generation to the youngest--seven generations in all." Lost/Nomads, GIs/Heroes, Silents/Artists, then Boomers/Prophets, Gen X/Nomads, Millennials/Heroes, Homelanders/Artists. "These four fully active generations comprise the generational constellation of the Millennial Crisis."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">319 Note that late elders are remaining in some meaningful leadership posts currently, like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, along with other important leadership posts in Congress and the Senate; the author calls this a "late elder" phase of life for a generation that has remained more active later in life (at least to some extent) compared to prior generations, this effect on the saeculum is not yet known.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>320ff The Lost Generation, born 1883-1900:</b> Hemingway, Eisenhower, conservative and careful in office; Ike, the last Lost Generation member in power, was replaced by a GI president, Kennedy, the Losts were like Generation X, they kind of got sandwiched, ignored, shuffled off the stage; they did with they had to do and made few demands on the generations before or after.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>322ff The GI Generation, born 1901-1924:</b> their last members are dying off as we speak; regular guys, effective teamwork, the people were "General Issue" just like the acronym GI; governments supported them significantly: helping them get jobs, homes, educations, paying pensions and healthcare etc., called "the greatest generation" by younger generations, who grew up in their shadow with deference, caution self-doubt; <b>whereas they triggered in Boomers (who had no personal memory of World War II) a desire to smash and wreck all their institutions in the '60s and 70s.</b> "By then, the nation seemed awash with rage, violence, drugs, eroticism, and the cult of self--everything that GIs considered hostile to their life mission of regularizing and homogenizing the world." By the '70s/80s they began retiring, enjoying generous benefits and keeping to themselves, turning over society to the Boomer generation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>325 The Silent Generation, born 1925-1942:</b> "The fortunate generation" in the phrase of demographer Richard Easterlin, now in their 80s and 90s; sandwiched awkwardly between two far better known generations; too late to be World War II Heroes and too early to be Boomers, <b>but they had a lifetime ride on the up escalator because of the success of the United States over that time. [As always, some generations get an easier ride than others through no fault or result of their own.]</b> Kind of like a Lisa Simpson generation: they kept their heads down, were looking for good jobs and pensions, etc. They got to ride along with post-war boom, had much better starting wages and lived better than their retired elders, they saved for retirement during the 1980s boom. Note also the Silent Generation's belief in the system and belief in playing by the rules; sociologist Charles Tilley said of his generation "we are the last suckers" while Woody Allen's joke (that 80% of life is just showing up) "is a joke that leaves younger generations gasping with incomprehension." (!)</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">331 The three elder generations, Lost, GI, Silent form the connection between the last Crisis era and this one, and they match up to today's generations: Lost is Gen X; GI is the Millennials, Silent is Homelanders/Gen Z; <b>Now to turn to the <i>next</i> constellation of generations.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>332ff The Baby Boom generation ("Boomer elders"), born 1943-1960:</b> mostly in their 60s and 70s today in 2023. Note also the census bureau considers the baby boom fertility bulge to be 1946-1964; this book thinks about age location in history so they date it slightly earlier. "No face of life really meant anything until they experienced it and could tell other generations all about it." [Holy cow that sure does describe their self-centeredness]; see also the expression from Todd Gitlin that the Boomers moved from "J'accuse to jacuzzi" [another good one]; on Boomers' individualism, their anti-institutionalism, their divorces, risk-taking, initiating the culture wars in the 1990s and 2000s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">338 Interesting metaphysical take on the Boomer generation, that in their escalation and hyperbole about everything they created their own social reality that "may as well be true." <b>Note also the Boomers' derision of the culture of their forerunners: mocking Bob Hope and The Lawrence Welk Show, while there Millennial children "respectfully memorized" Boomer culture. </b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">345ff Note that in 2005 Social Security and Federal health benefits spending was 7.8% of GDP, when the oldest Boomers were eligible for early retirement; by 2045 when the youngest Boomers will be in their mid-80s it will be 14.7% of GDP. The author believes that the Boomers in their elder years will make "large concessions" (raising retirement ages, taxing or reducing benefits, etc.) as "participation in a larger cause" [but holy cow I sure don't see that happening!] Ultimately the author believes that in their late years the great champion will "ride once more." <b>[Some of the descriptors of the Boomer generation are so celebratory and so delusional, it's not a surprise that this author is himself a Boomer. No surprise that this also is <i>by far</i> the longest section.]</b> The great champion can come from any generation but typically it comes from a Prophet archetype, thus it'll be a Boomer, and it will be a "practical necessity" during the Crisis consolidation phase in the late 2020s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">348 The author points out also that the "hell no we won't go" generation "could emerge as America's most martial elder generation since World War II." [It is quite frankly amazing how bellicose and warmongering the Boomer generation really is, especially over the past two decades.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>348ff The Generation X generation, born 1961-1981:</b> 85 million adults now mostly in their 40s and 50s. This generation got its name from the novel by Doug Coupland, raised under conditions near neglect, no-fault divorce, a baby bust generation... "America was doing great until <i>they</i> came along" (a message the Generation X themselves internalized), but it produced a resilient, self-sufficient generation with survival instincts, a skill for not wasting energy on stuff that doesn't matter, and an ability "to distinguish reality from illusion"; later maturing into the most protective parental generation in recent memory, mocked as helicopter parents.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">357 Note the grief that The Lost Generation both gave itself and also received from surrounding generations: the missionaries and the GI generation; see also what else happened with the Nomad archetype entering a Fourth Turning: The Lost Generation went on to administer and lead World War II and the aftermath, produced generals like Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower, leaders of World War II and directors of the GI generation; the analogy here would be that Generation X gets the same pushback from generations before and after them, but they also will have a second act, unlike the F. Scott Fitzgerald claim "a generation with no second acts" used to describe the Lost Generation.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">359 Interesting war/hostility scenario here and a picture of Generation X stepping in after all these years of cynicism to do something about it.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>362ff [Interesting to hear the author's characterizations of Xers as they move into power, I wonder if he'll be right]:</b> "By the end of the [2020s] decade, Xers will constitute a decisive majority of governors and mayors, a growing share of whom will be former entrepreneurs, CEOs, and housewives who will brag about their political inexperience." "Their hand strengthened by the emergency, they will sweep aside procedural legalisms, much to the anguish of many older Boomers and Silents." "Many of the traits they will have heard criticized for decades--their toughness, realism, lack of affect--will now be recognized as vital national resources."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>364ff The Millennial generation, born 1982-2005 [give or take]:</b> "Millennial rising adults" make up 102 million people, mostly in their 20s and 30s; it's likely that the last birth cohort of the Millennial generation entered high school during the COVID pandemic and are now about to graduate. Note also what shaped them was a backlash against the social experiments of the Boomers, therefore they have a family values view and a "kids are special" view; child safety became an obsession: Amber alerts, Megan's Law, all kinds of adult vigilance for children, rubber-padded playgrounds, etc. The Millennial kids themselves "welcomed" the sheltering; never was a generation tested more than the Millennials, nor has any generation "trusted in the ethic of meritocracy so utterly." They stopped taking party drugs and started taking "smart" drugs; extracurricular activities "turned practically professional, draining families in both time and money." A "sunnier if blander" generation, embracing surveillance, social media, family-friendly entertainment, boy bands and Taylor Swift. But despite making themselves career-ready, their economic situations have lagged other generations at the same stage. "Sheer precarity has persuaded Millennials to defer or avoid rites of passage that earlier generations took for granted: moving, getting married, having children. Among young adults, rates for all these activities have sunk to historic lows." "Generalized anxiety disorder is by far the fastest-growing psychiatric complaint among both the men and women of this generation."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>***[While reading through the section, you can't help but conclude that the surveillance state and the administrative state have just gotten started, it seems like the Millennials want it, they embrace it, they believe it makes them safer and happier, and we generation Xers just don't get it with our silly ideas about privacy and freedom. It's almost like they're a generation of <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2023/08/adaptive-markets-by-andrew-w-lo.html" target="_blank">Andrew Lo types (see the astoundingly naive chapter 12 of his book <i>Adaptive Markets</i>) who hope for some kind of Starfleet-based system that will just do everything for us, while not really thinking about the tyrannical nature inherent in the nuts and bolts of such a system</a>. They haven't realized yet how wasteful and incompetent the system--and the bureaucracy that makes it up--will be. Again, I hope I'm wrong!]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">373 Culturally, the Millennials get along great with their parents, they "shun risk and disorder" but yet they believe the system is fundamentally broken "and needs to be overhauled if not replaced."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">374ff Millennials toward the climax; the Millennials have a parallel with their echo generation the GI Generation as they "had been fussed over by protective parents determined to raise up kids as good as the Lost Generation had been bad." During the Depression the GIs "came to regard federal authority as a trusted friend who would always be there to help them."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>***[It's sobering to hear some of the GI-era standards contrasted to today's incompetence, where nothing works anymore: see for example the Seabees motto, while they built overnight airfields on Pacific Islands while defeating the Japanese: "The difficult we do at once. The impossible takes a little longer." Put that in context with for example Boston's Big Dig taking triple the time and triple the budget; the incompetence of the light rail plans for California; the multiple years it took to rebuild the World Trade Center... It's worth comparing us today a civilization that's <i>not</i> in decline: see where <a href="https://youtu.be/YQSx0ZVSfLo?si=QuYborB9ySRFJ2Uu" target="_blank">China can apparently build an entire subway station overnight</a>, while New York City's once-great subway system <a href="https://youtu.be/8Y4Rkz-3Uj8?si=Lsd7b3Pw2P_fM21I" target="_blank">burns $1.7 billion dollars on fire per kilometer and can't seem to do anything else right</a>.]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">378 The author posits a next-generation WPA-type project to build infrastructure, smart highways, transit loops, universal Wi-Fi, urban reconstruction, etc., with the Millennials doing the bulk of the work. [Again, the author, as a Boomer, doesn't fully understand the incompetence of the modern administrative state.] Per the author, the Millennials will be perfect for this mission as they grew up volunteering for public causes and designing communities in games like SimCity and Farmville. [??]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">378 "The Millennial perspective on the Crisis era will be very different from that of older Americans. For Boomers, the Crisis will mark a transcendent culmination; for Xers, a brutal midlife course correction. But for Millennials, it will be a launching pad for adult lives that will still lie ahead of them." <b>[Interesting quote here that brings to my mind parallels with <a href="http://whatijustread.blogspot.com/2021/11/when-money-dies-by-adam-fergusson.html" target="_blank">how, during <i>Germany's</i> hyperinflation, different generations dealt with the challenges differently: some generations were totally crushed by it, others felt it was exciting and set the stage for something new</a>.]</b> </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">[I still struggle to believe this author and his belief in the Millennial generation's heroism and the incredible heights that they're going to drive themselves to when this crisis happens] admittedly, one of his most valid arguments is essentially a neuroplasticity argument: the older generations will be too set in their ways and too "bound by earlier habits of thought and behavior" whereas the millennial generation is young enough to adapt (some better than others of course) and even change radically because of the crisis itself.]</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">384 The author allows for the possibility that the Millennials, given their proclivity to follow orders, might throw their weight behind some dictator or demagogue.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>384ff The Homelander generation, born 2006-?:</b> Gen Z is 75 million children, starting with 2006; their oldest members are now in high school and they won't have a real agreed-upon name until their leading edge is nearing 30. On the etymology of the name Homelander: it was chosen by this author's readers on an online survey based on the decade of the 2000s: marked by 9/11 and the Department of Homeland Security, based on a sense that the "homeland" was no longer safe; also because of the protective child raising style of Gen X parents, this generation was kept more at home than earlier generations of kids. This generation is striking because there's nothing striking about them; they're agreeable, coachable, earnest, close to their parents, sheltered, risk-averse, compliant, basically maxing out on Millennial characteristics; They have no memory of a prosperous or confident America; note also the sheer reduction in their numbers: fertility rate keeps falling, the Gen X-er baby bust is no longer unprecedented because now the Homelander baby bust is even more pronounced. Gen X parents spend a lot more time with their kids compared to prior generations--exactly what they <i>didn't</i> have in their childhood; also divorce rates among Xers continue to decline; on X-er parents not trusting institutions, specifically schools, to look after their kids; on how Homelanders are highly medicated and counseled, the most watched generation in history.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">394ff As the Homelanders head towards the climax, we can look to the Silent generation and their obedience, their good behavior (see Alfalfa and Shirley Temple as metaphors: minding their manners around adults and pulling the heartstrings of the most hard-bitten parent); during World War II, America had the best-behaved teenagers in its history.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">396 Good quote here: "The Xer teens were lost and couldn't be found... The Homelander teens are found and can't be lost."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">400 Note also the age cohort for the Homelander generation won't be known until after the crisis is over; just like we couldn't know the Silent generation's precise first birth year (1925) until it was clear who experienced active duty in World War II in 1944.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Part Three: Coming of Spring</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Chapter 10: A New Saeculum Is Born</b></div><div dir="auto">403ff Exploring what happens after the coming Crisis and the Fourth Turning, Again looking at the Silent and GI generations and what happened after World War II; note that just as the economy shut down its military production, millions of veterans came home looking for work; there was an expectation of class conflict and labor strife; GM faced an autoworker strike just a few months after VJ Day but it was quickly settled; there was a far more unity than anybody ever expected; people wanted to have kids, get married, buy homes, get good jobs, etc., and the economy boomed. Nobody expected it. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">406ff Looking at prior First Turnings: Andy Griffith was the metaphor then, where there was no crime and the police traded folksy jokes; the birth of suburbia and Levittown, a middle-class miracle with planned orderliness after the disorder of World War II; mass productions helped standardize people's tastes and made things more affordable; political partisanship declined, see also the <i>Organization Man</i> by William H. Whyte on the obedient social ethic of that era. See Robert A. Nisbet's book <i>The Quest for Community</i> where the author was astonished by the post WWII era and "the obsessive craving of men for tranquility and belonging."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>410 On the mind-numbing uniformity of post-World War II society; art critic Lewis Mumford despaired of the "multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers."</b> [!!!] See also how this is rendered in the 1990s film "Pleasantville" about two Generation X teens who go back to the 1950s and introduce people of that era to full color lives. "...the nation is likely to enter a similar era in the not-so-distant future."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">411 Six Anglo-American First Turning Highs:</div><div dir="auto">1487-1525 The Tudor Renaissance</div><div dir="auto">1597-1621 Merrie England</div><div dir="auto">1706-1727 Augustine Age of Empire/Revolutionary Saeculum </div><div dir="auto">1794-1822 Era of Good Feeling/Civil War Saeculum</div><div dir="auto">1865-1886 Reconstruction and Gilded Age/Great Power Saeculum</div><div dir="auto">1946-1964 American High/Millennial Saeculum</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">412 All six eras have been regarded as post-war; the Crisis has been settled and society gathers around a newfound sense of solidarity and direction; people want to gather, nest, procreate, and build; there's a trend toward greater order and cohesion. Greater national unity usually involving a single party to carry out "an ambitious agenda for national improvement"; "Political debate tends to be constructive and dispassionate--even decorous much of the time." "Highs are eras of robust economic and demographic expansion." "Fiscal and monetary policies are often explicitly disinflationary." <b>[This is actually not accurate: after the 1945 crisis and follow-up period which was highly inflationary as the US needed to inflate away its WWII debt]</b>; tremendous infrastructure projects, the Erie Canal, the railroad system after the Civil War, the highway system after World War II, etc. Inequality declines or isn't as bad, "people feel they have a 'fresh start' on more equal terms." Also more Victorian cultural behavior during these periods: see the Comstock laws after the Civil War, the 1950s culture, etc. Also enough collective pride to be lampooned or mocked, especially in the years afterward.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>419ff Positive scenarios for the next First Turning:</b> Early 2030s, say 2033, and ending say 2056; new global alliances, rebuilding; possible surveillance as part of greater "order"; A Salem witch trials/McCarthyism-type phase will happen too; eventually there will be growing confidence and optimism; much faster economic growth rates, recent negative productivity growth in education, healthcare, finance, etc., will revert; dramatically higher living standards; return of a social ethic; return to the family and "trad" roles and a likely postwar baby boom.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>431ff Unfavorable scenarios: </b>Note that Forth Turnings are at a minimum nation threatening: what if the challenge isn't successfully resolved? Examples would be nuclear war, or a non-nuclear outcome but one that resulted in the United States emerging as a damaged and diminished nation; see for example if it were clearly defeated in some great power conflict, or if it emerged from that conflict with a much more centralized authoritarian government.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>435ff The generations in the next First Turning:</b></div><div dir="auto">"One late elder generation will disappear, and another will emerge... The lineup will move forward one notch." The author starts with the late elder generations: GIs, Silents, Boomers. Note that by 2033 there will only be a few thousand GI generation left, they'll be in their 100s but we will salute their connection to the prior national trial just like we did the same with Civil War veterans after World War II, the last remaining Civil War veterans were frequently interviewed and talked about.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>437 The Silent Generation will enter the next First Turning</b> with about 3 million members remaining, there will be a comeback of some of the stylish aspects of that generation's culture. Also this generation will experience quite a bit of anguish because they spent their entire lives serving an old regime that no longer exists. Note also the next few generations might resist too much Boomer government, they probably will have an X-er for their leader (just like Truman prevailed against Missionary-era leaders during the prior American High, like Douglas MacArthur). Boomers will matter less and less with each passing year during the next High. <b>"Let's take everything salient about the Boomers pure personality--their individualism, their crusading zeal, their obsession with values and culture, their otherworldliness--and then let's steadily subtract all of that from America's current social mood."</b> [Good mental image of how to think about what will happen as that generation dies off.] "While most younger Americans will embrace the shift, most surviving Boomers won't." Note also the shock that comes to every generation when their symbols are turned into memes, their statues are "taken down" metaphorically and literally, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">437 The Boomers will still have 42 million in number by age 2033, they will continue to voice their convictions and be senior legislators, academics, media guest stars, etc., and will remain quotable and quick to take a stand, or as the author phrases is "always ready to take listeners on long and solipsistic voyages into their own heads." [!!!!]<br /></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>439ff Generation X elders:</b> Gen X will be age 52-72 during the next first turning, at 84 million members the second largest generation of adults. By the end of the First Turning in 2056, Gen X will be age 75-95 with perhaps 47 million; they will "comprise the era's dominant generation of senior national leaders" but it will be for a relatively brief time, partly because they are behind Boomers who are still in leadership and can't accept that the crisis is over, likewise they'll be eclipsed by younger Millennials who want to create their own Great Society; this generation will end ultimately experience the costs of a lot of these things with benefit cuts that they'll have to accept ownership of, savings that get inflated away, etc., just like the prior Lost Generation; the Nomads entering elderhood. "As seasoned Nomads replace prophets in elderhood, they slow the pace of social change, shunning the old crusades in favor of simplicity and survivalism." </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>441 Nomad generations have the "unhappy fate.. to be young in an era when age was respected, and old in a time when youth took the palm." See Washington's peers or John Adams, who knew for certain that "mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">441ff Millennials in midlife: Millennials will be age 28-51 in 2033, the largest generation at 113 million, and by the end of the First Turning in 2056 Millennials will be age 51-74 with still 107 million. They "will be the largest generation of voters and the dominant generation of midlife parents." <b>Also just as we talked about the subtraction of Boomer traits steadily, consider the steady <i>addition</i> of Millennial traits over time, sociability, teamwork and consensus, trust in technology, etc. "The millennial influence will be rising just as its archetypal opposite, the Boomer influence, will be falling."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">443 See Jefferson attacking John Adams in 1800 or John Kennedy attacking Dwight Eisenhower in 1960; the incoming Millennial political power will displace elder-generation incumbents and the younger generation will appear confident, rational, ambitious, while the older nomad generation will appear anxious, small-minded, and uncertain. "As confident Heroes replace Nomads in midlife, they establish an upbeat, constructive ethic of social discipline."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>445ff Homelanders/Gen-Z in rising adulthood:</b> In the first turning in 2033 Homelanders, age 4-27 will number about 99 million, most still children by the end of the First Turning. By 2056 they'll be ages 27-50 and will be the largest generation at 107 million; by the end they'll be the dominant generation of parents in K-12 schools. They're too young to be anything but bystanders early in the next First Turning. They will look like Silent Generation members, they won't call attention to themselves: conventional, mainstream model citizens, inoffensive. "As sensitive Artists replace Heroes in young adulthood, they become trusting helpmates, lending their expertise and cooperation to an era of growing social calm." "An Artist generation comes of age just as the post-Crisis social order is solidifying. With little room to maneuver, this 'inheritor generation' embarks early on approved life paths." See for example the gray flannel suits of the Silent Generation and how they proudly consider themselves technocrats and crowded into government and big corporations.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>447 New Prophet Youth:</b> The new Prophet generation born 2030-2052 are "a conjectural generation." Their first birth year should start about four years before the end of the Forth Turning, their last birth year about three years before the end of the next First Turning. By 2056 there will be 105 million of them ranging an age from 4-26, the post-Crisis generation of children half-parented by Millennials, half by Homelanders/Gen Z. This generation will be like the Boomers, they will have no memory of the prior Crisis, they'll be viewed as having limitless potential, raised to want for nothing, the world will be running well and their nation will be a great success for as long as they can remember, and they will follow the script for Prophets entering childhood. <b>"As indulged Prophets replace Artists in childhood, they are nurtured with growing freedom in a fail-safe world designed by powerful adults."</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">450ff Finally note how the Prophet generation always shocks and surprises the generations before who expect them to grow up in an orderly fashion, following their footsteps. No one expected Jonathan Edwards to start his revolution or the Transcendentals to do theirs; they had no inkling that the Baby Boomers wouldn't want to just live in the same houses, drive bigger Pontiacs and work for the Pentagon, so the Second Turning will surprise the parents' generation and thus lead to a new Awakening in the late 2050s-2070s, another Second Turning, with a cultural awakening, protests, family arguments, youth rule-breaking utopian lifestyle experiments, and the Millennials and the Gen Z/Homelanders won't comprehend it. And then of course this will set up another Third Turning and Unraveling in the 2080s-2090s.</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>Epilogue</b></div><div dir="auto">453 On the ritual and often curative four quadrant sand paintings done by the Navajos as well as Buddhist monks in Tibet. On the suffering, demoralization and confusion and disconnection of this era. <b>On how we must conform to the season: if it's winter we should act like it's winter, knowing and acknowledging that winter has arrived allows us to see clearly and plan responsibly, as well as help those around us.</b> Likewise given the archetypes of each generation, what is expected from our generation, what will the weaknesses be of our generation and how can we avoid them and as well harness our strengths?</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[I like how this author is a classicist, he looks to the ancients and their understanding of cyclicality, and he's an anti-modernist, whereas the modernist thinks linearly rather than cyclically and everything is on an up-and-to-the-right path... this guy knows better]</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto">457 On the Bhagavad Gita and its central message that no one should forsake his Dharma; <b>one has to fulfill one's role, and one must do so with as much honor and proficiency and humanity as he can muster. One must live up to one's obligations.</b></div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>458 Note also how modernity didn't allow us to escape the cycles of history: if anything it grooved them even more because we became unmindful of them and acted out our parts all the more automatically</b>, it's quite ironic. </div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>[Good quote here in the Acknowledgments on why it's a struggle for people to look at history in this way in the modern era but how useful it can be once you adopt the paradigm].</b> "Thinking about history archetypically, as the product of overlapping generational scripts, is an acquired taste, like the habit of closely observing how people dress or talk. It starts with a glance here and a comparison there, and then it draws you in, until you can't help but notice significant patterns in everything you see changing around you, from politics to pop culture."</div><div dir="auto"><br /></div><div dir="auto"><b>To Read:</b> </div><div dir="auto">Quincy Wright: <i>A Study of War</i></div><div dir="auto">Leopold von Ranke: <i>Civil Wars and Monarchy in France, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i></div><div dir="auto">Leopold von Ranke: <i>The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i></div><div dir="auto">Leopold von Ranke: <i>History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514</i></div><div dir="auto">David Halberstam: <i>The Fifties</i> </div><div dir="auto">Abraham Lincoln: <a href="https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm" target="_blank">The "House Divided" speech</a></div><div dir="auto">Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: <i>Primitive Mentality</i></div><div dir="auto">Ray Kurzweil: <i>The Singularity Is Near</i></div><div dir="auto">***Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: <i>The Cycles of American History</i></div><div dir="auto">Censorious: <i>De Die Natale</i></div><div dir="auto">George Modelski: <i>Long Cycles in World Politics</i></div><div dir="auto">Thomas Paine: <i>The American Crisis</i> (pamphlets)</div><div dir="auto">***Ibn Khaldun: <i>Muqaddimah (Introduction to History)</i></div><div dir="auto">Erich Fromm: <i>The Sane Society</i></div><div dir="auto">Thomas Wolfe: <i>You Can't Go Home Again</i></div><div dir="auto">Lewis Mumford: <i>The Brown Decades</i></div><div dir="auto">Lewis Mumford: <i>The City in History</i></div><div dir="auto">***Henry Adams: <i>The Education of Henry Adams</i></div><div dir="auto">Anthony Giddens: <i>The Nation-State and Violence</i> </div><div dir="auto">***Norbert Elias: <i>The Civilizing Process</i></div><div dir="auto">Mancur Olson: <i>The Rise and Decline of Nations</i></div><div dir="auto">William Dean Howells: <i>The Rise of Silas Lapham</i></div><div dir="auto">Eric Klinenberg: <i>Going Solo</i></div><div dir="auto">Craig S Karpel: <i>The Retirement Myth: What You Must Know to Prosper in the Coming Meltdown</i></div><div dir="auto">***Douglas Coupland: <i>Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture</i></div><div dir="auto">Bruce Gibney: <i>A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America</i></div><div dir="auto">***William H. Whyte: <i>The Organization Man</i></div><div dir="auto"></div></div>Danielhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02388302796031288076noreply@blogger.com