Discover new books on Goodreads
See if your friends have read any of David Wineberg's books
Sign in with Facebook
David Wineberg’s Followers (809)
15,356 books
|
2,491 friends
1,784 books
|
310 friends
5,657 books
|
128 friends
454 books
|
138 friends
980 books
|
444 friends
1,556 books
|
358 friends
1,796 books
|
751 friends
1,601 books
|
631 friends
More friends…
David Wineberg
Goodreads Author
Twitter
Genre
Member Since
May 2014
NO LONGER AT GOODREADS. REVIEWS AT MEDIUM dot COM slash davidwineberg SAME QUALITY, BETTER SITE.
To ask
David Wineberg
questions,
please sign up.
Popular Answered Questions
David Wineberg
That's a lovely invitation, but wouldn't it be much better to invite the author? She's out there looking for these kinds of opportunities, while I wou…moreThat's a lovely invitation, but wouldn't it be much better to invite the author? She's out there looking for these kinds of opportunities, while I would only provide a third hand summary or my take on her words. It would make it easier to promote the panel, too.(less)
|
The Straight Dope: What I Learned From My First Thousand Nonfiction Reviews
really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 6 ratings
—
3 editions
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
ANALYSIS OF THE GREATEST EVIL IS WAR
0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
—
2 editions
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
David’s Recent Updates
|
David Wineberg
rated a book it was ok
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
How to catch my eye: a recent Nobel Prize winner looks at murmurations, the great clouds of starlings that sweep through the sky as one otherworldly being. And that as merely the introduction to a book on such complex systems. In a Flight of Starling
How to catch my eye: a recent Nobel Prize winner looks at murmurations, the great clouds of starlings that sweep through the sky as one otherworldly being. And that as merely the introduction to a book on such complex systems. In a Flight of Starlings by physicist Giorgio Parisi held great promise. Sadly, I spent the whole time looking for it to begin. My suspicions arose when I opened the file and found it was only 94 pages, divided over eight tiny chapters. At best, this could only be top line stuff. I was then disappointed with the first chapter, on murmurations, which revealed remarkably little. A bunch of Italian physicists concocted a gizmo of numerous synced cameras, each taking stills of a murmuration. They assembled the stills of different angles into a story of how it worked. There were so many images, they could have made an animation out of it, he says. Which poses the question: why didn’t they just use film and shoot it fast, so they could get a slow motion production that would show them everything they wanted to know? Instead, they took the long way round. Their discoveries were quite limited. The cloud is not a sphere of starlings so much as a flat disk. This makes it easier to swing towards new directions, and makes it easier for individual birds to know their place in the scheme. They look forward only, to the bird ahead, maintaining constant distance so that all can fly at the same speed, much as humans driving at fast highway speeds do (for the most part). The direction and so the changing shape, is orchestrated from the edges of the murmuration rather than the center. If birds at the center tried to change the direction of the whole flock of thousands, it would result in a massive crash, but if the edge pulls away, the whole thing can gracefully stretch and change course, which is what makes it so entrancing. Finally, the density at the edges tends to be a good 30% more than in the center. This is why the murmuration seems to stretch into a new shape - starlings along the edges with no other bird beside them are what change its overall shape. That’s it. Nothing too deep here. But since the book was supposed to be about complex systems, from a man who won a Nobel Prize for his insights, I eagerly ploughed onward. Unfortunately, it quickly degenerated into a memoir, whose most significant aspect was name dropping. Parisi knows, knew or at least acknowledges pretty much everyone who ever won a Nobel Prize in Physics (He won his in 2021). Everyone is a giant, and they all do great work. Got it. When he finally gets back to entertaining the reader with what ought to be fascinating observations, it is about theoretical constructs, nothing like murmurations. He goes on endlessly about the three phases of water and the physics of phase transition, for example. The other major systems chapter is on disorder – spin glasses. Here’s his definition: “Disorder is born from the fact that certain elementary entities behave differently from others: some spins try to go in opposite directions; certain atoms are different from most others; certain financial actors sell shares that others are buying; some dinner guests actively dislike others who have been invited and want to sit as far away from them as possible.” I’m not sure that explains anything. In between, there are chapters on Italian physicists he knows, his own history, which began in university in the keystone year of 1968, which he explains in detail, and anecdotes about other physicists and school in Italy. It seems physicists can get their ideas from anywhere. Sometimes it takes years to develop them, and all it took was another physicist asking a pointed question. Einstein began thinking about relativity after he watched a housepainter falling from the scaffold around his apartment building. The painter was sitting in a chair the entire time. This is apparently what got Einstein thinking. And he changed the world with it. So I really couldn’t wrap my head around what the book was even about. It certainly wasn’t complex systems in nature, as the title implied. Then, in the very last paragraph, Parisi finally lets the secret out: “This book is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science.” But that’s not what was advertised. David Wineberg If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
|
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book it was amazing
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
The salmon you eat is all but certainly farmed, shot with dye so it comes out pink, and chock full of meds and poisons. There are almost no wild salmon to catch commercially any more, and a big part of it is precisely because of salmon farming. The i
The salmon you eat is all but certainly farmed, shot with dye so it comes out pink, and chock full of meds and poisons. There are almost no wild salmon to catch commercially any more, and a big part of it is precisely because of salmon farming. The industry is the pride of Norway, and has spread around the world, eliminating local salmon as it goes. We are rapidly approaching the days when farmed Atlantic salmon is the only salmon available. This grinding story is laid out in all its aspects by Semin Setri and Kjetli Ostli in The New Fish. The authors are Norwegian journalists. They put six years into this book, visiting farmed salmon facilities in Norway, Scotland, Canada, USA, Chile – and seeing for themselves how Norway has inspired the whole planet to farm salmon. They’ve verified what they’ve been told, sought proof for claims, and expanded in every direction the story took them, following every lead to a conclusion. The result is a totally fair and evenhanded picture of where we are today and how we got here. It is far less than pretty. It is, at bottom, ugly hubris and playing God. The whole world is actually poorer for it – except for the fishfarming billionaires, of course. In the 1960s, some Norwegians decided they could do salmon better. They tried cross-breeding them with trout and other fish, fed them this and that, and in general sought to increase their size while reducing the time it took for them to grow. Really quickly, they thought they did that successfully and were excited to start raising them in huge quantities in pens at the mouths of fjords, where their natural precursors passed on the way to and from spawning. There was no one to monitor it, much less regulate what they were attempting. The prospect of frankenfish never held anyone or anything back. As with the domestication of any animal (including homo Sapiens), there were unforeseen changes they only found out about later. The new fish grew really fast, and far bigger than their wild cousins. This meant less time and money raising them. On the other hand, their flesh was gray not pink, and very unattractive in things like sushi. So vendors produced dyes, in a palette of pinks, whatever shade the farmer wants. Farmed salmon is faked right on the package. And then it gets worse. It transpired the new fish were slow swimmers. This was not surprising since they were penned up their whole lives and never had to navigate a waterfall, rapids or an ocean. But when they started escaping the pens in huge numbers, scientists found out the hard way they had tiny, deformed hearts. No great concern in a pen perhaps, but these fish turned up dead at the seemingly the slightest exertion or even stress. Stress could be a change in water temperature or moving them around for processing. They all have elevated levels of cortisol. And the fatal Piscine Myocarditis Virus. Their Cardiomyopathy Syndrome causes massive blood surges all over the body, and the heart bursts. And farmed salmon don’t communicate like other fish. Many say they appear to be deaf. One way or another, tens of thousands of dead farmed salmon turn up around seemingly all such farms. Norway alone reports 52 million salmon die before they reach harvest weight. Annually. And that doesn’t include young fry that don’t even make it to adolescence. What becomes of all those dead fish? They become fishmeal to feed – the salmon. The stats are that 68% of all fishmeal in the world go to feed farmed fish, along with 88% of fish oil. Because salmon are predators. They eat smaller fish. Whole species of smaller fish are being wiped out in order to feed farmed salmon. But the really big problem was (and remains) lice. Salmon lice had always been there, but fast moving salmon spread out over rivers and oceans avoided contact with them. In pens however, it was like – well – shooting fish in a barrel. Unbelievable numbers of lice cling to farmed salmon. They burrow into the flesh, leaving living salmon with great chunks missing and exposed flesh bleeding. The salmon sicken and die. Worse, the lice are now in such numbers they infect passing wild salmon too. The pens are a death sentence for all salmon, wild and farmed. Lice are the salmon farms’ largest product. Not having projected anything like this (what could possibly go wrong?) farmers tried (and continue to try) everything. They scraped the salmon, put them in heated water or cold water – anything to loosen the grip of the lice. They tried all kinds of chemicals and poisons. For example, the entrance to fjords all over Norway now suffer the presence of 120,000 metric tonnes of hydrogen peroxide, which kills all kinds of crustaceans, but leaves the lice alone. They tried cleaner fish – small fish that pick the lice off bigger fish. But the cleaner fish cannot live in the waters where the salmon are raised, and die out every time they are shipped in. They are now scarce as a result. Farmed salmon are also physically deformed, with an entire menu of deformities in varying penetrations within the crop, from wavy spines to crooked mouths to misshapen hearts. All the chemicals and poisons the farmers dumped on them made the salmon suspect for human consumption. Studies were undertaken. Yet in one remarkable study, Norwegian scientists found it to be perfectly safe for pregnant women. No ill effects at all. It turned out that was because they refused to feed the women farmed salmon. They ate wild only. The researchers said it was out of the question to give farmed salmon to pregnant women subjects. Far too dangerous. A most ridiculous study that proved the point better than anything. As with cattle, getting protein from salmon is highly inefficient. More than half the cleared acreage in the Amazon goes for animal feed production, mostly soy. A salmon eats five meals of human food for every meal it gives us, the authors say. Salmon comes third after beef and pork in its outsized climate footprint. Even chicken turns in a better performance than salmon. And yet, that is how Norway portrays it to the world – a miracle of sustainable farmed protein. Aquaculture is Norway’s gift to the future of mankind. One of the biggest problems is the government of Norway itself. It is salmon farming’s biggest fan. It extols the virtues everywhere it goes. Its various government-sponsored organizations keep a tight rein on scientists, forbidding them to say anything negative about it. The government seems totally focused on aligning everyone’s enthusiastic support for farmed salmon. Millions of tons of it now ship to the world annually. Even the authors felt it. Before the book came out, they published an article from it that wasn’t totally onside, or at least that was the way the government saw it. The criticism of them came from all corners of the country. The pressure was intense. Their credibility was shot. They couldn’t get interviews with anyone. Zero co-operation was the government’s game, and it had the power to implement and enforce it. The authors were messing with the saintly image of Norway, when no one was allowed to challenge it. Meanwhile, wild salmon have a huge role to play on Earth, and eliminating them will bite back hard. Because wild salmon have all but disappeared. Salmon fishing seasons are being cancelled all over the planet. (One Norwegian salmon fisher complained that he finally got a tug on the line, but no fight. It turned out to be an escaped farmed salmon. It had no strength and no fight in it. He said it was like reeling in a plastic bag.) The authors interviewed Alexandra Morton, who has been fighting the farming of salmon in the Pacific northwest and Canada for 40 years. She says “They head out to sea, drawing energy from the sunlight on the water, which causes plankton to bloom, which are in turn eaten by animal plankton, which are in turn eaten by the small salmon, who during their migration to the sea accumulate energy and then bring it back to the coast, where they also feed other species. Why care about salmon? If you breathe, you have to care about salmon.” The book is absolutely wonderfully laid out. There are lots of photos demonstrating what the authors are talking about. The images of salmon festooned with lice as they swim around are unforgettable. So too are images of thousands of deformed and dead salmon. But they are counterbalanced by the stunning vistas of the coast of Norway, even if every fjord entrance is clogged with salmon pens. Each chapter is concise, dealing with some issue that would never have even occurred to most readers. This makes the whole thing a revelation. It is written like a newspaper feature, meaning it is a clear, swift read, easy to understand and powerful in its message. But it also profiles its human subjects so readers know their backgrounds and passions. It does it all and it does it well. Towards the end, they quote some wisdom from people who had far more insight into how the world works than the government of Norway does. Here’s Walt Whitman: “It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” And John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” I can only hope The New Fish wins a rack of awards to put the silencers in government and the industry back in their place. And maybe save the salmon. David Wineberg (The New Fish, Simen Setri, Kjetil Ostli, July 2023) If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
Jul 03, 2023 07:32AM
· 16 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
The New Fish by Simen Saetre.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — The New Fish by Simen Saetre |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book liked it
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
Alan Arkin is a different kind of actor. He has a stage presence so strong he often appears to be a total mismatch with the rest of the cast, observing more than participating. So with his short book Out Of My Mind. In the book, Arkin relates a bunch Alan Arkin is a different kind of actor. He has a stage presence so strong he often appears to be a total mismatch with the rest of the cast, observing more than participating. So with his short book Out Of My Mind. In the book, Arkin relates a bunch of stories of inexplicable events. There is a sudden memory of himself approaching a scaffold in revolutionary France. There are hot flashes and blinding lights, crippling fear and sudden cures. His normally totally concrete-reality mother suddenly revealed his dead father appeared before her shortly after his death. And she never spoke of it again. Mostly, the stories seem to reflect his study of East Asian religions, with their extensions into reincarnation and life forces. They have cured of him of going to a therapist. These kinds of events and stories are often told, and usually have no explanation. In this case, Arkin wants there to be no explanation. He says as a young man his was adamant that what he believed should be imposed on the whole world, even as his views changed. Today, he insists he has no such belief system or ideology. He takes it as it comes, meditates a lot, and attempts to be at peace. He says he tried to write down all the things that he was absolutely sure of and could only come up with two for all eternity: Everything changes, and there is no such thing as too much garlic. If that helps. The Alan Arkin we see on TV, films and plays is like that – slightly removed from the vortex, and observing it as an education. Usually with pained incomprehension. That he is actually like that in person is a revelation to me. I first saw him in a TV drama/special called The Lovesong of Barney Kempinsky. It aired just once, in 1963, and I have not only not forgotten it, it has made me want to see everything he showed up in ever since. I have not been disappointed. This little (100 page) book of semi-memoirs on the unexplainable is a finetuned insight into the man. It will not likely change the reader’s outlook on life, but it explains quite a bit of his. David Wineberg ...more |
|
|
Jul 01, 2023 08:29AM
· 6 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
Out of My Mind by Alan Arkin.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — Out of My Mind by Alan Arkin |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book really liked it
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
So who are all these scientists denying climate change? David Lipsky profiles them and gives them all the color they deserve in The Parrot and the Igloo. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But Lipsky has managed to both entertain and amu
So who are all these scientists denying climate change? David Lipsky profiles them and gives them all the color they deserve in The Parrot and the Igloo. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. But Lipsky has managed to both entertain and amuse in this gossipy but deeply researched book. It puts the players and the major events in perspective, and shows the deterioration of science in the process, thanks to a small cadre of quacks and frauds. The overall impression I got was that they were and are people of very low quality, as well as amoral. These so-called skeptics are of the anything-for-a-buck genre. Some of them reversed course and contradicted their own clear statements to join the deniers’ gravy train. And let there be no doubt: there has been an immense and fabulous gravy train, funded by the usual suspects – Big Tobacco and the Koch Brothers. Many of them are out and out frauds. They have no relevant education, no credentials, no career history and no accomplishments that would merit their classification as climate authorities. They all seem to seek fame and fortune from this, and they calculated that they could achieve it on the denial side, which is very lightly populated. As Steve Milloy, one of the worst (he’s still out there pushing debunked claims at his junkscience website and on Fox), said “There are only about 25 of us.” But with tobacco money and media seeking out the “other side”, they make far more noise than all the hundreds of thousands of global scientists who understand the facts. The deniers got huge salaries, offices, globetrotting appointments, first class travel, and set up their own think tanks to further their masters’ cause and rake in donations. And all they have to do is make waves. Lipsky shows the real scientists have been right. Their predictions have proven to be conservative, if anything. And their timelines have proven to be largely correct. Their near unanimity on climate change comes from thousands of scholarly papers, peer reviewed and published so they can be replicated and verified. And so they have, untold times. The deniers, by contrast, refuse to write scholarly papers. None of them have published results of their own studies. None have conducted studies that could be replicated by others. Literally all they do is deny, with no basis or backup. Very early on, Big Tobacco came up with a catchy way to deny climate change. They got their talking heads to say it was “junk science”. This struck a chord with conservatives, who continue to repeat it as if it had any meaning. It doesn’t. The studies conducted by actual scientists survive rigorous rules, procedures and protocols. The results are made public so others can compare results. That is how science works. The deniers refuse to participate. The deniers say science doesn’t work via consensus. Maybe, but as Science’s editor pointed out in 2001 “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science.” The consensus among 25 well paid deniers is far more absurd. Big Tobacco then came up with its counter to junk science: sound science. They even set up their own group, Advanced Sound Science – or ASS – run by the loudest of the loud. It has, needless to say, contributed nothing to science, but has convinced a lot of Republican congressmen that “sound science” is always missing in action. They long for it, if only it existed. And they will accept nothing without it. Not that anyone knows what it entails. There is no methodology for dramatic new sound science. As Stanford biologist Donald Kennedy explained it: “It doesn’t have any normative meaning whatsoever. My science is Sound Science, and the science of my enemies is Junk.” At their most generous, the deniers claim “more research is needed”. No one can disagree with that, so it is safe to repeat after every new paper and discovery. But as the US Surgeon General of the era understood about smoking and smog: “Research without action is a dangerous sedative.” Deny and delay is proving fatal. The final puzzle piece/cliché word in the denier arsenal is uncertainty. Washington under Reagan, Bush and Trump made it into the most common descriptor of every scientific finding. Nothing was ever clear; there was always uncertainty in science. Science is just plain unreliable in 21st century America. Then under Trump, the word climate was banned altogether. So there was no need for uncertainty any more. But why tobacco? It seems that Big Tobacco cottoned on to climate change as the ticket out of the secondhand smoke controversy. They figured if they could malign the science behind clean air, they could dissipate the criticism of their customers killing their own children with their smoking. It’s a stretch, but Big Tobacco saw it as a lifeline as more and more customer lawsuits went against them. Worse, airlines were beginning to limit and then ban smoking onboard, followed by offices and restaurants. It had to be stopped as soon and as loudly as possible. Money was no object. So Big Tobacco went after global warming. They would take down the whole planet for cigarettes. In Lipsky’s recap of history, he shows the greenhouse effect has been well known and well accepted for hundreds of years. Three hundred years ago, philosopher-scientists determined that the atmosphere contained CO2, and at a very important level. If CO2 were cut in half, the planet would freeze to death like Mars. If it doubled, the planet would boil to death like Venus. Those nearby planets were the laboratories, living demonstrations of the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. Real evidence, right in front of us, all along. In the 1950s, definitive predictions began to appear, showing irreparable damage to the climate unless reductions were made immediately. My own favorite was the Russian Roulette model: Every decade, you add another bullet to the revolver and have one of your children (or later, their children) pull the trigger with the gun at their own heads. That metaphor runs out in the 2020s, where we see record, out of control heating, fires, flooding and mass migration chaos all over the world. The deniers, meanwhile, continue to claim the world would be far better off with much more CO2. It would be warmer and much more comfortable year round and far more lush because plants (at least poison ivy, Lipsky found) would love more CO2. Still waiting on that nirvana. It’s a leg up on God. In 1970, everyone got it. Even President Richard Nixon joined in, proclaiming a new federal agency, the EPA. He said 1970 must be the year “when America pays it debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment. It is literally now or never. “ Richard Nixon said that. Really. And on a CBS-TV news series called Can the Planet Be Saved, Walter Cronkite said “We found not one who disagreed that some disaster portends.” The USA was frightened and onboard until the Carter years, when fuel shortages, and Carter’s love of domestic fossil fuel firms began to turn the tide of opinion (In terms of actual oil imports though, the USA went from $3.7 billion in 1971 to $427 billion in 2013, despite all the self-sufficiency maneuvering). This followed a period of killer smogs in LA, New York and London, diverting attention to visible, smellable, choking pollution. It was literally an in-your-face issue. Much more immediately critical than long-term warming. Add Big Tobacco agendas, and conservative lawmakers could soon be counted on to actually laugh at climate change. It eventually became a hoax to them (by whom or for what gain was never clear). Eventually, the fossil fuel folks read the Big Tobacco playbook and piled on, pumping more millions into denial, while real scientists had their already inadequate funding cut back. Big coal, for example, only decided in 1991 to band together and reposition global warming as a theory, not a fact in the mind of the public. It worked. This at any rate is the way Lipsky presents it, except it is delightfully character-driven, which is unusual in my experience. He has been following it in great depth for decades. He has met the key players, attended the hearings, read the transcripts, and even read the awful publications of the deniers. He says writing this book has made him angry, and subject to outbursts that cost him friendships. He cannot believe how such selfish and ignorant men (all but one are men) can get away with so much fraud every day, for decades. It is costing us the planet, for their fame and comfort while they live. On behalf of cigarettes. Lipsky’s quirky style makes it easier to digest, in some ways. His descriptions of the players is consistently colorful. Here’s how he describes Charles Keeling, who was obsessed with measuring CO2 all over the world: “He had oversize ears, a crewcut, friendly eyes—in a suit, he looked like he’d been sent to body jail (…) He measured with a Zen frenzy.” It is Keeling’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that is the global gold standard for CO2 measurement. Since he set it up, CO2 has gone from 313 ppm to 413ppm, passing well into the way-too-much atmospheric CO2 zone. (Before the industrial revolution, it was in the 200s.) When Keeling died in 2005, his son “Ralph—good, no-fuss name” picked up the baton. Jim Hansen, the most famous whistleblower of climate change, was a NASA engineer who testified to this problem starting in the 1950s. There is no question of his qualifications. He became the most positive and public face of climate science for decades. He has often been called the Paul Revere of global warming. Lipsky says of him: “He has the catcher’s mitt face of a farmer, someone you might see giving reluctant directions to a sportscar at the side of a long, flat highway.” I confess I don’t know what that means. Here’s another: Prominent climate scientist Wallace Broecker “looked, in the kindest way possible, like a highly evolved frog. Flat cheeks, wide mouth, bulge forehead. Which makes a type of sense: his specialty was water.” This is not your average climate change analysis. Another highly qualified scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland “had the look of a local TV weatherman—owl glasses, weedy brows, friendly and concerned; a man who would use complicated phrases, then take the trouble to explain.” Does that help? It was Rowland who said: “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?” Just for saying that, he deserves a better description. Speaking of complicated phrases, Lipsky is a specialist in them. His paragraphs are filled with partial sentences, stray adjectives, and obscure references. He has successfully out-obscured me, as there are three or four I could not make head nor tails of. I can only assume they come from some dark corner of pop culture I have not dwelled in. My hat comes off to Lipsky, but it doesn’t help the read. He describes LA’s first smog tests as “It was junior prom: first corsage, first limo, first dance.” You don’t necessarily know what he’s talking about, even though it is clear and in plain English. “(Global warming) had resumed its usual awful timing. A kind of historical reboot.” No idea. “The self-defense of last resort is the gavel.” It is? Do you hit people with it, or is an auction the last resort? Maybe Congressional hearings? It turns out to refer to suing someone, in this case suing Arthur Robinson, the man whose non-existent think tank made up the signed statement that claimed 31,000 signatures of scientists, all non-believers in warming. For two decades, this fraudulent claim circulated as the real thing, cited by Fox News repeatedly as if it were new each time Robinson added more signatures, and of course was the very foundation stone of denial. It turns out it was made up, with ridiculous cutesy names and a lot of “scientists” with degrees in computer science, if any. Actual climate scientists, though, were much less in evidence. The very title of the book is about as obscure as can be. Pretty much only David Lipsky would get it. And he takes several pages to explain it. So the book has issues. Nonetheless, it is a fast-paced and highly descriptive overview of how the USA abandoned scientific discovery for a hoax. It profiles all the key players, and not always in a flattering light. And it acknowledges that too late was in the 1970s, not 2050. So the ride will only get bumpier as we add bullets to the overloaded revolver. David Wineberg If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
Jun 26, 2023 07:16AM
· 11 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book it was ok
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
For years, hell – decades, I have been reading nonfiction well-peppered with quotes from Theodor Adorno. He gets cited for practically any subject. He had pithy things to say about seemingly everything, from psychology to television. I have built up
For years, hell – decades, I have been reading nonfiction well-peppered with quotes from Theodor Adorno. He gets cited for practically any subject. He had pithy things to say about seemingly everything, from psychology to television. I have built up an image of him as perceptive, wise and insightful. A true polymath, rare in the last century. So I was delighted to be offered a brand new book of his collected essays on culture. It’s called Without Model and it is very revealing – but not in a good way. Adorno was first and foremost a musician, he said. As an German intellectual as well, he used his love of music to interpret everything he experienced along with lots he just read about. The results have often been inspiring. But having read the 16 essays here, I now see Adorno as more of a linguine chef, throwing sentences against a wall to see if they stick. The undercooked vastly outnumber the worthwhile ones. Adorno thrived in the first two thirds of the 20th century, so he has plenty to say about cultural shifts, including art, film and of course, music. My first real problem with Adorno is his use of the word immanent, meaning inherent or built-in. He uses it at least 25 times in these essays, more than I have ever seen it employed, and it is stifling. He seeks to cripple artistic license and expression with it. He makes sweeping claims about people, society, art and architecture—with no backup whatsoever—by claiming they have immanent structures and processes, like Western music does. I totally disagree that everything has a rule set to constrict it. If anything, I see art and culture striking out in all directions, often crazily, straining to reject any rule sets if they actually try to interpose themselves. It is often the artist’s specific goal to break as many rules as possible while saying something important. (And yes, I know he is far from the only one to deny this.) Another problem is unsubstantiated claims. Adorno makes them and moves on, leaving them dangling. For example, there’s this observation on a paradox of culture: “Tradition confronts us today with an irresolvable contradiction: there is none present and can be summoned, yet if all trace of it is erased, the march towards inhumanity begins.” Not fundamentally true from where I stand, and not explained, let alone proved, by Adorno. Another example: “From a distance, however, the Eiffel Tower is the slim, hazy symbol that extends indestructible Babylon into the sky of modernity.” There are plenty more of these, and as I read them, I came to the conclusion they were not worth further thought at all. They are superficial, trivial and inconsequential observations based on nothing whatsoever. Yet from this same rulebound writer comes a chapter in a multipart essay that begins with the word “However”. I freely confess it stopped me. I’ve never seen that before. They’d have flunked me in English had I tried that stunt. But every so often, there is an insight that is memorable, such as his reminiscence as a ten year old being treated as worthy and a peer by a professional singer: ”I felt I had been taken up simultaneously into the adult world and the dreamt world, not yet suspecting how irreconcilable they are.” That’s the Adorno I love to see quoted. There’s also this result of his readings: “…a faithful translation of the Greek—Aristotphanic—word that I understood better the less I knew it: utopia.” Finally, in a discussion on inequality, he says “All the literature that rails against snobbery, which is in fact immanent in a society where formal equality serves to produce actual inequality and domination, conceals the wound even as it rubs salt into it.” These are inviting ideas I would love to read further on. But Adorno has already sprinted away to other thoughts. He was a busy thinker. Some things to totally disagree with: -For some unexplored reasons, Adorno hated art nouveau. This is a style I happen to love. I even dealt in art nouveau antiques for a number of years, so I am very well versed in it and its artists. Adorno says things like ”…all the films that wish to let wandering clouds and darkened ponds speak for themselves are leftovers of art nouveau.” This is not only a slight on art nouveau, but wrong about film as well. He does not follow up with an explanation, either. He unexpectedly goes after art nouveau this way six or eight times in the course of the book. It is not endearing – or even elaborated. Art nouveau broke the mold of the suffocating Victorian rule books, in art, in design, in furniture, furnishings and appliances, and in architecture. It was the last time that form mattered more than function. It was joyous and wild and liberating. But for Adorno “the arts defied the neat standardization—which is exactly what art nouveau was.” -The Baroque era comes in for even more intense floggings. He claims that we today express an ”ideological misuse of the Baroque,” which somehow lessens its importance in music, art and architecture. Yes, baroque has become an amorphous adjective, but so what? -He says it is “nonsense” to perform the music of the Baroque era on period instruments, which happens to be a very popular trend, for a several decades now. Yes, instruments today are far more sophisticated, but that does not lessen the experience of hearing what the composer and the audience heard in that era. -He claims blurred shots and flashbacks in film are “silliness” and that we should “renounce” them, basically because they counter the realism so central to film. Could anything in culture be less true? But worse, his language is immensely dense. It is often difficult to make sense of his sentences, though they seem to be well constructed: “The demand for a meaningful relation between materials, procedures and import on the one hand and the fetishism of means on the other blend into a murky texture.” This is something Noam Chomsky could have written about meaning and grammar. It looks like good language, but at the same time it also appears to be total gibberish. There are whole pages of this. I refuse to go back and try to make sense of them. And his all-out dismissals become tiresome: -“Every commercial film is really no more than trailer for what it promises the viewer while cheating them of the same.” So much for film. -The same applies to art: “In order to become fully art, art must crystallize autonomously according to its own formal law. This is what constitutes its truth content; otherwise it would be subordinate to what it denies through its mere existence.” This too goes on for more than a page, and as far as I can see, explains nothing that needs explaining and is of no use in liking, appreciating or promoting art. -He even blithely dismisses the poor, saying “If there were no more poverty, humanity would have to be able to sleep as unguardedly as only its poorest do today.” Poverty provides the best sleep? Not only painfully wrong, but so arrogant. Spoken like an effete elitist. Finally, the book provides references to minor German artists and thinkers that readers will not have heard of. It makes his claims null and void as there is little way to understand what he meant with these references. The cultural restrictions on top of the wild claims will lead readers to rush past the entire section instead. Because stopping to research the reference will almost certainly not result in a Eureka moment. So it is a difficult book to enjoy or learn from. Without Model is billed as unique – the first time these essays on art and culture have been translated into English. I think it is self-evident why. David Wineberg If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
Jun 19, 2023 07:06AM
· 2 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
Without Model by Theodor W. Adorno.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — Without Model by Theodor W. Adorno |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book really liked it
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
On the one hand, War Made Invisible, Norman Solomon’s latest book, plays right to me. I have always been offended at the blatant racism of American wars. It always infuriated me that the very people America was supposedly defending were called Gooks
On the one hand, War Made Invisible, Norman Solomon’s latest book, plays right to me. I have always been offended at the blatant racism of American wars. It always infuriated me that the very people America was supposedly defending were called Gooks or Towelheads or Hadjis by American soldiers in their countries. That mainstream media played up every single American military death overseas, but totally ignored the huge piles of civilian deaths caused directly by the Americans supposedly defending them. In fact, it was the Americans who were killing them. On the other hand I understand that war is not fair, is not meant to be fair, and frankly, it is important to fool the entire population into thinking Americans are the good guys in every way. After all, how different is it than Putin forcing the whole country to call his invasion a special operation and never a war? Where the number of military deaths is a state secret, just like the USA blocked reporters from seeing caskets repatriated. As I read, I felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. The lies Solomon cites are endless and eye-wateringly gigantic in scope as well as number. In particular, the chapter on the mainstream media is revolting in its revelations. Management at the major tv networks forced all staff to toe the government line. No criticism of the war (no matter which one of the many) would be allowed. At CNN, there would have to be constant reminders to viewers of the role Afghanistan played in 9/11 (none at all) when reporting on life there. Civilian victims were irrelevant, never worth profiling. The lies that led to the war were not to be exposed once the war got underway. It wasn’t long before the war was barely ever even mentioned. Yet it was America’s longest. Phil Donahue lost his long running hit tv show precisely because NBC did not want to be seen as questioning America’s bogus reasons for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, which was the official excuse for those wars, along with lies about weapons of mass destruction, which the USA holds in abundance. (At the same time, Saudi Arabia, which provided ¾ of the 9/11 terrorists, still sold its oil to the US, and the US continued to sell it its most sophisticated arms and training in them.) The same went for NBC reporter Ashley Banfield, who dared to question their legitimacy in a speech not even broadcast on the network. She was banished from the airwaves, held to her contract to show up every day, but given no office, no camera, no computer and no assignments. No one was allowed to have an opinion other than the official one. So much for the vaunted American free press, specified in the US Constitution. Solomon’s chapters are neatly divided, and then highly detailed. Yet they are a breeze to read, and offensive in every conceivable way. They will be offensive to ultra patriots, hawks, doves, peaceniks and roadkill alike. That universal offensiveness, almost by definition, implies strong truth. In one chapter, he shows how simple repetition of a lie or the continual omission of a fact eventually become truth themselves, a guiding principle of government in war. Another chapter focuses on the idiotic concept of a humane war, in which Americans are so highly proficient killing machines they can take out specific targets (people) without harming anyone else. This was always farcical, and now, true figures show the extent of the lie. While America claims several thousand of its soldiers were killed in its newfangled remote wars, innocent civilian casualties number in the hundreds of thousands thanks to its humane tactics. Along with the “highly targeted” bombings of weddings, funerals and public markets, there is the lie of the drones. Solomon cites experts admitting that seeing though the camera of a drone is like looking at scene with one eye closed and the other looking through a drink straw: “a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers.” The man with his finger on the red button has no idea what is going on on the ground. And since drones fly fast, their sound only reaches the scene after they have passed, so no one can run for cover or know what hit them. Another chapter focuses on race, comparing the bleeding heart coverage of all the brave suffering of (white) Ukrainian victims of Russian war crimes, to American war crimes of exactly the same nature against victims who were black, brown, Muslim – anything other than WASP. The hypocrisy of American coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war is massively offensive to the world outside the USA. And of course, the so-called War on Terror comes in for some sane reflection. To no one’s great shock (and awe), the War on Terror has created at least twice as many armed terrorist groups as were busy hating Americans before war was declared. It has immiserated millions of victims, turning their economies back 500 years. It has also embittered them to America and Americans. And thereby perpetuated itself. Solomon cites investigative reporter Nick Turse: ”The U.S. government – responsible for up to 60 million displaced people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen due to it war on terror – bears special responsibility.” As US generals have publicly stated, terror is a tactic, not a target. You cannot go to war against terror. And you certainly cannot defeat terror in a classic war. You can never declare victory over terror, and terror cannot ever surrender. It’s an old saying, but a good one: every war has two losers. While it has fooled most, and continues to, there are often a select few who see through it. Even at the time, Joan Didion claimed: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.” While government and the media cheer on the lie daily. Solomon cites 22 countries on four continents subject to unrestricted American bombing since 9/11/2001. The USA continues to maintain well over 800 military bases – overseas alone. War in America is a constant. It is a normal part of life, hardly noticed. There is no draft, no rationing, no war bonds, no clothing drives. It is just noise in the background of life as usual. In Solomon’s terms, it is invisible. Russia is vilified in the media for using cluster bombs in Ukraine, but no such criticism befalls America when it employs them with the same horrific results. The simple truth is that while 140 countries agreed to cease their use, Russia and the USA refused to sign on. American soldiers are not the good guys riding to anyone’s rescue. They are everyone else’s idea of Hell. Every year, polls are taken around the world, asking what is the biggest threat to peace in the coming year. And every poll results in the same top answer: the United States. The final full chapter deals with the unbelievable costs of war. Solomon does the usual thorough job of showing how the money spent on one Predator drone could itself finance some worthwhile program, either in the USA or in the victim nation. The trillion dollar cost of a war today is plainly unimaginable, which is precisely how administrations get away with financing them. He shows how far more veterans suffer the effects of American wars than are killed, and how much they cost the economy every year –almost as much as the military budget again. All of it avoidable and preventable. That money spent on the military is money all but totally wasted, compared to the money spent on job creation, healthcare and so on. As I read, I also thought this is nothing new either. Starting wars has always been indefensible. The costs have always been astronomical. They have often bankrupted the nation, as happened to France for coming to the aid of the newly birthed USA, for example. The national debt soars higher with each one, all of it money that does not go to the benefit of the citizens. Solomon doesn’t even bother with how stopping forever wars would balance the budget, pay for Medicare For All as well as social security, and make the USA an idyllic place for Americans to live. The book clearly has its place. Whole generations need to understand this. It has to be repeated continually, as new generations don’t get it. But my God, Norman Solomon, how do you stop it? David Wineberg (War Made Invisible, Norman Solomon, June 2023) If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
Jun 12, 2023 06:52AM
· 15 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
War Made Invisible by Norman Solomon.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — War Made Invisible by Norman Solomon |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book really liked it
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
Ever since the ancient Greek philosophers, western thought has been focused on logic. Everything, it is claimed, can be understood as operations of and, or, or not. It has gotten mankind quite far, but it has limited both progress and creativity. Bio Ever since the ancient Greek philosophers, western thought has been focused on logic. Everything, it is claimed, can be understood as operations of and, or, or not. It has gotten mankind quite far, but it has limited both progress and creativity. Biologist Angus Fletcher is here to straighten that out and restore the high office of the narrative, in his latest book, Storythinking. It is a most unusual book, plumbing the depths of history to find where philosophy went off the rails, examining neurobiology for insight into creativity, and festooned with stories about great characters all the way through. I can honestly report I’ve never read anything like it. And that’s a good thing. Biologically, Man is keyed to sight and action. Forcing the brain to assign logical explanations for everything he sees and does has taken tens of thousands of years, and has not proven a thorough answer to much of anything, Fletcher says. If Man could return to his natural self, the result could be a whole new universe of thought and creativity. Instead, we today believe that intelligence itself derives from logic, an empty concept by comparison to what could be. No wonder we think every story has already been told. He discovered that story wasn’t just for telling, as we have been led to believe. Story was for thinking. It was a way of life, learning, and projecting. This is not a new discovery. Fletcher found that “MBAs at Harvard University, the globe’s most successfully self-promotional business school, are scrupulously instructed: ‘Telling a story has proven to be a superior way of communicating information, because people process stories differently than they do non-narrative information, such as a simple recitation of facts.’” He says the problem with logic is that it seeks an ideal product, while storythinking seeks an ideal process. Product is a thing; process is becoming. Early literature: Greek, Roman, English – was all about becoming – a hero, a champion, a survivor, a god . A product is dead by comparison. This sort of logic-seeking, tortured interpretation is not a happy place. Fletcher points out we have a habit of “abstracting practice into the theory of practice.” In an endless attempt to simplify, we overthink to force ourselves into the new box. Where we can never be happy with the results. Because it represents no truth at all. Storythinking, on the other hand leverages “our personal, physical, emotional and intellectual growth. (It is) accelerated by empowering the storythinking of the people around us.” Far from obsolete or redundant, this is Network Effect in action. The more people have at it, the more valuable it becomes to all. This hammering a square peg into a round hole has lots of unintended side effects, too. For one thing, it demolishes the joys of literature: “By converting literature into language and then interpreting language with semiotics, America’s futuristic curriculum was flattening four-dimensional narratives into two-dimensional propositions that reduced characters to representations and plots to arguments. Behaviors became themes, happenings became meanings, and actions became allegories, expunging much of the psychological activity that Shakespeare and the rest of our global library had been crafted to generate.” Is it any wonder kids won’t read? Fletcher has his own rules and framework to grow creativity, much more accommodating to the way people are built: Prioritize the exceptional, shift the perspective, and stoke narrative conflict. Out of those parameters, he thinks, far more creative outcomes are possible. He says there are four elements to story: characters, storyworlds (environments with their own distinct laws as to what can and cannot happen), plots (sequences of action), and narrators (“their why shapes how it is told”). This is certainly not what they taught in my schools. Logic and metaphysics are simply not equipped for “solving ethical or biological problems such as personal and social growth.” And yet that is what most of the world’s greatest literature is all about. “Logic un-narratives narrative, creating fables with morals, myths with archetypes, heavens with commandments, stories with symbols, media with representations, and other timeless interpretations that evaporate storytelling’s core function: the innovation of action.” Today, you couldn’t sell a book without those qualities evident, cutting off potentially groundbreaking stories at the knees. And finally, logic is artificial, while storythinking is “part of life, and the law of life is growth through variety.” For Fletcher, we have strayed – far. Having made his points, Fletcher cinches it with: “What our brain’s dual mechanisms thus reveal is that narrative and logic are complementary tools. There’s no way to replace storythinking with deduction or interpretation, any more than there’s a way to replace a hammer with a saw.” There is a lot on artificial intelligence (AI) in Storythinking, as it seems in most books I’m reading these days. For Fletcher, AI will never overtake human ingenuity, because it simply processes words looking for patterns, on request. He says “Limited data is the province of the narrative, and narrative is the province of our brain’s synaptic machinery.” Human intelligence has a “main source: the plan-generating, hypothesis-imagining, action-inventing neural processes of storythinking.” I’m not at all sure that is correct, as AI seems capable of imitating writers, writing stories in their styles, and in general, being all but indistinguishable from them. And I’m really not sure what would happen if someone tasked AI with outside-the-box thinking. Notable by its absence in Storythinking is the word reduction. Reductionism has been the logical endpoint of numerous disasters, such as healthcare, for example. Doctors routinely fail to listen, claiming to have reduced the symptoms to a clear and simple diagnosis without further investigation. This goes on in politics, and even in the sciences like physics, where Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to reduce the entire universe in to neat and simple geometric shapes. Yet somehow, Fletcher doesn’t focus on it. Similarly, he does not venture in mind-expansion through things like psychedelics, which countless creatives employ to break out of the stifling mold of logic and reductionism. Because for all the marvelous connections neurons make to bolster human thinking, there are infinitely more possible connections when not forbidden by logic, efficiency and deduction. The book ends with an absolutely jampacked Q&A of Fletcher with himself. It is a rapidfire summary answering most of the questions readers might have, imparting at least as much information as the rest of the book. It is a most unusual conclusion to a book, and is worth the price of admission by itself. I guess one should expect no less from someone professing storythinking. David Wineberg (Storythinking, Angus Fletcher, June 2023) If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
Jun 05, 2023 07:19AM
· 2 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
Storythinking by Angus Fletcher.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — Storythinking by Angus Fletcher |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book it was amazing
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
It is fashionable to talk of the 2020s as a time of upset, instability, turmoil, revolution and war, all without any factual basis, just gut feeling. What is really shocking is that science and math show that it is all true. In End Times, Peter Turch
It is fashionable to talk of the 2020s as a time of upset, instability, turmoil, revolution and war, all without any factual basis, just gut feeling. What is really shocking is that science and math show that it is all true. In End Times, Peter Turchin describes how countries come to this point predictably, and how all of it can always be traced to two factors: elite overproduction, and the concomitant immiseration of the 99%. In the regular cycle, the time for overturning everything is now. This is quite possibly the most important book of the decade, and affects absolutely everyone. It explains precisely where we are and where we’re heading, based on thousands of years of the same cycles. Unfortunately for the USA, this knowledge comes too late. To make a long, detailed, involved and complex story short, as the rich grow their families, their children want power and money. They take it from the poor, in low wages, low taxes on capital, removal of rights, reductions in aid, and increases in incarceration and fines (the “wealth pump”). They achieve their goals through a direct line to power, bypassing normal channels. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer and more numerous, protests begin. They are chaotic, leaderless and without clear goals. They evolve into bloodletting, literal or physical, which ultimately greatly reduces the number of the elite. Basic wages go up as fewer workers survive and are available, and equality reaches a high point. And the cycle begins again. The Chinese have seen this cycle endlessly: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” But Turchin can say this definitively because of a giant database called CrisisDB. It goes back thousands of years, through all kinds of societies and nations. And everywhere he researches, it is the overproduction of elites that strains the system. And causes its demise. It has long been proclaimed that human society, being composed of individual humans, is far too complex for any kind of model to operate consistently and successfully. But the data say that in high level, general sweeps, patterns and waves occur regularly and predictably. The differences make no difference. With war, the generation of the war cries loudly – Never again! The next generation enjoys some level of peace, but by the third generation, all is forgotten. People are emboldened again, and ready for the “glory” of another war. So with politics. Equality reigns for a couple of decades, then distortions begin to appear. Larger numbers of people become fabulously rich, and all their circle want to have their say in power. There aren’t enough positions in government or influence for them, so they become frustrated and embittered. The demands of the rich flood the halls of government. They fund radical candidates, arrange for removals and assassinations, and in general, darken the outlook. Laws begin to dramatically favor the rich at everyone else’s cost. The 99% become outcasts (flyover country, deplorables, welfare queens, poor, homeless). They look back at their parents, who had decent jobs, decent pay and decent households, and wonder how and why all that went away. This is exactly what Donald Trump tapped into, even though he clearly had no desire to change any of it. His actions enriched the richest, and his plans were to further impoverish the poor, but his words were to Make America Great Again. That appeal rang truer than anything today’s 99% had ever heard, and they bought into it, hook, line and sinker. But Trump was never going to be the solution. He would only speed up the process to disaster. Wages had been going down since the 1970s. Unions were shoved out of action. Universities became laughably unaffordable. So did housing. Even life expectancy dropped. Child labor laws are being softened to help suppress minimum wages. This is exactly the configuration of pretty much every civil war and revolution: the rich want their power, and the rest want decent conditions. Something has to give. And it is usually the floor, not the ceiling. That the lot of the 99% has not and will not improve fits totally into Turchin’s research. Unless someone comes to their aid and reduces the glaring inequality, governments will fall, constitutions will be tossed, domestic terrorism will increase, and civil wars will break out. And elites will light the match. In this decade. The Chinese knew it. So did Tsars Alexander II and III. Yet we keep falling into the same trap. Turchin has been working at this a long time. His team has built a remarkable dataset. It extends to the point of revealing that: -When societies are in equilibrium, human height is measurably increased. Americans were the tallest in the world in the 1700s. And before a civil war, people don’t grow nearly as tall; they actually, measurably shrink. It is plain for all to see. -Life expectancy changes as the cycle approaches the chaos stage. He says American life expectancy has never fallen three years in a row since the Great Depression of 1933. But it has just done so. And Covid-19 is far from exceptional. Major epidemics “are often associated” with these periods. -“Nearly half of the millionaires who thrived during the Roaring Twenties were wiped out by the Great Depression and the following decades, when worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita.” It was the greatest leveling ever seen in the USA. -“In one-sixth of the (global) cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent. Bad news for the elites. Even more bad news for everybody was that 75 percent of crises ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in one-fifth of cases, recurrent civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of exits led to the death of the state –it was conquered by another or simply disintegrated into fragments.” -The “CrisisDB confirms that rise-and-fall cycles in societies with polygamous elites are substantially shorter than such cycles in monogamous societies.” In English – nuclear families produce fewer children, delaying the inevitable competition for power. In other words, the data has a lot more to tell us than we even know to ask. This is a whole new way to look at the world. It happens the same way all over and throughout history. Turchin examines not just the US, as it approaches this low point right now, but also England at several points, France, Russia, the Roman Empire and China, which has the longest record of it. The commonalities occur at every stage. When the cycle is fresh and people are equal, they co-operate. The common good is an important value to them. But as the rich grow in numbers and in wealth, and pull away from the pack, “the sense of national cooperation with which states quickly rot from within” takes over, Turchin says. This is as precise a summation of the US today as I have seen. It is shockingly true. People begin to fear and hate institutions. They want to seal the borders to keep what little is left for themselves. Turchin points out that it is the ruling class that wants open borders. They mean more competition for jobs, so lower wages and more government aid programs they can manage for profit. He cites Bernie Sanders saying open borders is “a Koch idea” and nothing he supports. But the ruling class always gets its way – until the end. It has been decades since voters had any real say in government. Legislators bow to rich donors. Voters only count during elections, not in legislatures. A billionaire has purchased himself a Supreme Court justice. The rot has become glaringly visible. It is the ruling class that scares off equalizing legislation, by say, calling inheritance taxes a death tax, even though it only applies to them and not the 99%. They are also behind denying climate change, calling it a hoax, in order to deflect attention from the ever increasing rates of fossil fuel consumption. In this environment, “money is free speech” Turchin says. Let there be no doubt who is leading everyone down the path to self-destruction. For Turchin, the “wealth pump is one of the most destabilizing social mechanisms known to humanity.” And unfortunately, “it is too late to avert our current crisis.” Elite overproduction has taken many forms. In many cases, it was military. The rich sent their children to the armed forces, to serve as admirals and generals. In religious societies, they became cardinals and high priests. Under royalty, they became governors, given stipends and pensions for life. Today, they are CEOs and kingmakers, buying elections to get pliable officials who will increase their wealth. In China, Turchin says, for two thousand years it was the educated. They had to take difficult civil service exams to get into government. To fail the exam meant a peasant’s life. Today, the Communist Party of China still operates this same way. If the Chinese can’t get into the party and pass the tests, they are doomed to have zero power or respect. And in all these cases, when there are more candidates than positions (Musical Chairs, Turchin calls it), there will be unrest among the elite. And it is the elites who will undermine the system before the 99% get organized. In Turchin’s terms: “The most important driver is intraelite competition and conflict, which is a reliable predictor of the looming crisis.” Today’s clue is rich parents bribing school officials to get their (apparently unworthy) children into top universities. But even that is no guarantee of success, as newly minted lawyers find they begin with a quarter of a million in debt and few prospects to rise to the top in an overstuffed industry. The civil service figures in another way as well. Smaller societies are not subject to the same cycle, because they might not have an administration, “but once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with bureaucratic empires.” Overpopulation has essentially eliminated that marker, making it merely an interesting footnote. As I read, my own warped mind kept sliding way out of scope of this book, to ecology. Because just when we’re beginning to understand what needs to be done to save the human race and its ecosphere, civil wars and wartime governments will have no time, no inclination and no money to deal with trivia like climate change. Power itself will be at stake. The 2020s could be the final nail in more than one coffin. In an appendix, Turchin salutes Isaac Asimov, whose 1960s era Foundation trilogy centered around “psycho-history”, the science fiction notion that the whole galaxy operates on a clear cyclical pattern of governance and inevitability (Turchin calls the real thing “cliodynamics”). Would that Asimov were around today to reflect on that as actually true. End Times is a six star book, not because of the writing style, which is friendly but a little flabby, but because Turchin pulls together a vast jigsaw puzzle and changes the face of history with it. It is dramatic. Every page is a revelation. Dots are connected. Questions are answered. Relevance gets established where no real importance had been noted before. It is important because it determines, reveals and reinforces a universal truth: it is the lack of governance over the rich that causes all the cyclicality of society. Instability, turmoil and wars can be seen as failure to control the elites from their corrupting influence in society after society, era after era. That is a significant step in our understanding of history and ourselves. This is a whole new way to see how the human world works. And we should be embarrassed that we didn’t realize it a lot sooner. Because we’re about to pay the price. Again. David Wineberg (End Times, Peter Turchin, June 2023) If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
May 30, 2023 02:26AM
· 46 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
End Times by Peter Turchin.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — End Times by Peter Turchin |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book really liked it
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
We can be thankful that Scott Shapiro wanted to be accurate. For his book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, this Yale University philosophy and law professor returned to school to learn coding – the art and science of it, its lingo, and its nuances. Pretty m
We can be thankful that Scott Shapiro wanted to be accurate. For his book Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, this Yale University philosophy and law professor returned to school to learn coding – the art and science of it, its lingo, and its nuances. Pretty much everything has changed since he took up coding as a kid in the 80s. This re-education effort has allowed him understand what has been going on in the world, both real and cyber, and transmit in nice plain English how everything has been falling apart. He does it by teaching readers the basics of coding, like the difference between code and data. This is key to how to understand, if not actually devise malware, including worms, viruses, vorms and ransomware. It’s not exactly a treat, but Shapiro makes it move briskly, and it helps readers understand the very different attacks they read about. He also profiles the hackers in depth, following their trackdowns to arrest and conviction, and how precisely they damaged computers, the internet, and the roadkill of innocent bystanders, by the millions. Hacking is not necessarily intuitive or straightforward. For example, Shapiro says “If you want to start a fight among antivirus researchers, ask them to define virus. If you want that fight to turn into a brawl, ask them to distinguish viruses from worms.” For the record, not all malware is viral. Viruses need to be able to self-replicate to be viruses, as well as to infect other programs. Worms seek to exploit network vulnerabilities, as opposed to hardware or software vulnerabilities. Worms have the bigger job and are much larger than viruses, which, like medical viruses, are dumbfoundingly simple and tiny beasts. Viruses just have to trick humans into installing and executing them. The spine of it all is five major internet hacks, many of which might be familiar to readers because they extended to the world at large, well beyond the forums and chat rooms of the internet. They include The Morris Worm, the first takedown of the internet, long before everyone had their own computer. The Minecraft Wars sought to kill off competing servers. The Paris Hilton Scandal, The Bulgarian Connection, the Internet of Things/ Denial of Service exploits, and of course Fancy Bear and the evisceration of the Democratic Party in 2016. What they mostly have in common is anonymous male teenagers becoming a threat bigger than a world war. The internet was so sloppy, so unprepared for malice and so rushed to gain market share that security and elegant code took a back seat, or more accurately, no seat at all. Fancy Bear is a code name for the Russian GRU unit that spends all its time infiltrating computer networks, sites and services all over the world (Cozy Bear is the same kind of unit, but at Russia’s FSB, the successor to the KGB). Their bizarre mandate is to shake the confidence of users in other political systems and somehow come to appreciate Russia’s lovely status, stability and power. Fancy Bear is just one player, albeit a global one. Far bigger exploits have been committed by simple, single teenagers who know how to bamboozle a customer service rep, write a short (less than 2000 kb) program to crush a system, and weaponize the internet of things into slave machines to run massive denial of service attacks on whomever they want to extort money from - to make it go away. The teens all dreamed up their schemes themselves. They all acted with zero concern for anyone else, and while they all might have begun it for the thrill of it all, they sometimes graduated to wanting the big bucks. Fancy Bear wanted nothing less than the dissolution of the American electoral system. It even invented Guccifer2 to taunt the internet with its power to destabilize. Shapiro explains it is a truism that every country has departments that do this to other countries. The USA has the biggest and the “best”. It is expert at disinformation and hacking. It is a truism that international law does actually permit spying between countries, if only because the signers knew that no one would stop. And it is a truism that most countries have made it illegal for other nations to spy on them (while they expand their own spying of others). What a great example they all set. Is it any wonder that teenagers feel free to dive right in? About the only thing I did not like in Fancy Bear Goes Phishing was Shapiro’s rose-colored glasses over cyberwar. His position is that only weak nations wage cyberwars against the powerful, because they know they can’t wage real war against them. Therefore, the USA, for example is probably safe from its entire electrical grid being taken down. Because no one wants to suffer the response from America. This might work in a Logic class at Yale, but in the real world, not only does anything go, but every weapon ever invented gets deployed. No exceptions. If they build it, they use it. Players do not always act in their own best interests. Rogue teenagers can gum up carefully crafted policies. Wildcard maniacs cannot be predicted or prevented. Fortunehunters don’t care about weak vs strong. Neither do the rich. Applying logic to this cauldron of instability is laughable. It’s another “What could possibly go wrong” moment. Is there blame? Lots. Congress all but totally fails to live up to its responsibilities to regulate cyberspace. Corporate greed recognized this instantly, and abandoned any kind of security measures in favor getting more and more defective and unsecured products out there in the race to be the biggest. (Once again, I cite the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s galaxy wide success. It was due to their fundamental design flaws being completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy already saw this in the 1970s. Congress, not so much.) The winner take all mentality subsumed all else. To become the standard, to have a lock on their markets. To own the client. It’s just garden-variety monopoly, totally enabled in this fresh and wide open arena of cyberspace. It was and remains the opportunity of a lifetime. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed endless examples of egregious overreach, abuse of privilege, and outright lies. And that was just by democratic governments. The very existence of secret courts and secret court orders, where not even the accused are allowed to know their own involvement, continues to be a major stain on America, along with surveillance of - everyone. The false façade of cyberspace (“Information wants to be free!”) is aided and abetted by negligent and malicious government. If there’s blame, that’s where it lies. All these things opened the hangar doors for bored male teenagers to notice they could have it all too. It was so silly that firms actually published the factory-set login information on their websites for their smart products. Hackers collected them and published lists of logins and passwords, ranked by their accuracy and reliability. In creating their gigantic botnets, hackers took over hundreds of thousands of smart toasters, security cameras, doorbells, coffee makers and thermostats, instructing them to send their data to denial of service targets, flooding them with garbage data and causing them to crash. The owners of the appliances never even knew. But then, they probably never even knew what their own passwords were and so did not change them. For some this book will be nostalgic, with perhaps some new details, particularly regarding the personal stories of the hackers, a worthy read in its own right. For most, it will at last explain what it all means in the context of out of control corporate and personal greed. It will appeal to several different audiences and satisfy all their inclinations and needs. It is fast paced, helpful, and accessible. It makes sense of it all. Shapiro is of the opinion that it is not possible to win the hacker battles definitively. Rather, he says, there are different approaches to what he calls the three categories: crime, espionage, and war. Their differing goals require different countermeasures, and therefore different deterrents and tactics. It’s another aspect of this book that makes it different from the pontificating books I have read before it. The real hope of cyberspace is breaking it of its winner take all mentality. Just like any society, be it Man or beast, widely distributed varieties of DNA will save it from being wiped out by a single virus or bacterium. Having multiple brands of computer, multiple operating systems and multiple network protocols can help prevent any attack from taking down everything in a few minutes. Like he shows the Mirai botnet did – repeatedly and relentlessly. Because it could. We can learn from this book. David Wineberg If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
May 23, 2023 07:02AM
· 7 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J. Shapiro.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — Fancy Bear Goes Phishing by Scott J. Shapiro |
|
|
David Wineberg
rated a book it was ok
|
Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Rate this book
Clear rating
|
|
I just reviewed a terrific book by Vaclav Smil a couple of months ago, and now here is already another. Prodigious doesn’t begin to describe this author and academic. There are nearly 50 titles listed in the Also By. All of his books that I have revi
I just reviewed a terrific book by Vaclav Smil a couple of months ago, and now here is already another. Prodigious doesn’t begin to describe this author and academic. There are nearly 50 titles listed in the Also By. All of his books that I have reviewed have been fascinating. Until this one, Size. This one is a crazy quilt of trivia and topline findings on anything even remotely to do with sizes. And if size is not an issue, Smil finds a way to make it one. This is not the Vaclav Smil we have come to appreciate and love. He wanders from the astronomical (the known universe so far is 93 billion light-years across and each light-year itself is about six trillion miles) to the submicroscopic atomic (a difference of 35 orders of magnitude from the universe), and settles in on mammals. There’s lots to examine in Man, including overall size, length of limbs, size of skull, height, BMI, heart functions, sight, and so on. It becomes a festival of little known facts, and the people who determined them. In his usual thoroughly numbers-based way, he makes endless points about endless things. Of cars, he points out that SUVs produce 25% more emissions than sedans at a time when environmental consciousness would normally have focused on more efficiency, not less. Size differences impress him. He loves comparing the smallest to the largest: the smallest engine, producing five watts, is the model airplane motor Tee-Dee. The largest is the Wartsila Marine Diesel, producing 84 megawatts. It’s a kind of randomized Guinness Book of Records for the first hundred pages. But soon, Smil starts applying the concept of scale. By enlarging something, will it perform better, consume more, or even be feasible? Some things scale in a linear fashion; if you double the size, it will be doubly powerful, and/or consume double the fuel. Motors are like that. Some things are less than linear, and give back less than simply having two of them would. All very reasonable, but still left me wondering what the book was about. In terms of profundity, Smil still says some very Smil-like things (thankfully): “Modern civilization will not be able to design its way out of its many predicaments.” Cities cannot simply get more and more crowded. Greater Tokyo, at 40 million people, is as populous as Canada, the second largest country in the world. That sort of thing. It is interesting, but less so as it goes on. Screen sizes range from four cm (an Apple watch) to 150 meters (a Jumbotron). Or this: “More than a billion people (the global count of all road vehicles is now approaching 1.5 billion) are now individually commanding machines whose unit power is commonly an order of magnitude higher than the power of the largest mid-19th-century industrial waterwheel designs used in large flour mills and textile factories.” What to do with that data? Everything is getting bigger, from cars to ships, from homes to office towers. People want bigger, including their own bodies. This leads to how to calculate your own BMI, and how obesity besets people in various societies. He analyzes just how big things can possibly be. Steel lets us build taller buildings than wood does, for example. But traveling up the world’s tallest buildings is a commute itself. How much of that can we take? This leads to two chapters on of all things Gulliver’s Travels. Smil criticizes Swift for his math. Reading Swift without a calculator will let gullible readers believe what he says about tiny Lilliputians and gigantic Brobdinagians. They’re impossible, Smil says. He says the Lilliputians needn’t have worried about feeding the gigantic Gulliver, because food requirements aren’t linear with size. Lilliputians eat more per gram of body mass than Gulliver would. He also shows that Lilliputians could not exist at all, because things like lungs and hearts can’t simply scale down and operate at the same efficiencies as man-size. Cell size would not change, for instance. A Lilliputian brain in such a tiny skull would not permit the bearer to act as a human. Brobdinagians would have to have bones like no other beings on earth to support their weight vertically. They would not be able to move, much less thrive at the heights Swift cites (65-70 feet tall). Their hearts would be impossible. Their brains, in skulls that gigantic, … well, you get the idea. I just kept thinking, this is fiction, a fairytale. Why are you bothering to assassinate a 300 year old fairytale? Over two chapters of this slim book? But then the book turned really sour for me. Smil decides to devote the last quarter of the book to the Statisticians Hall of Fame. He is all over his heroes from, France, Germany and his native Czechoslovakia who founded or developed major portions of Statistics. There is a segment on how to calculate a standard deviation that I could have lived without. There’s an ode to the beauty of normal distribution, how it got its name, and how many places it can be applied, mostly accurately. How largely predictable patterns in the natural world give comfort to statisticians. Inverse power law gets its own section, too. It actually became a hard slog, uniquely in my experience with the books of Vaclav Smil. He lost my interest to the point of me thinking, how is he going to tie all this together? Because so far, it was life, the universe and everything. When I finally got to the Conclusions (yes, plural. He has FOUR of them: a thousand words, a hundred words, ten words and one word), my worst fears were realized: “Anybody expecting a grand synthesis culminating in a small number of conclusions imparting concentrated wisdom about size will be disappointed.” Well to Smil’s credit, that was another prediction that came true. David Wineberg If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-... ...more |
|
|
May 16, 2023 06:27AM
· 5 likes · like
· see review ·
preview book
See a Problem?
We’d love your help.
Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of
Size by Vaclav Smil.
Thanks for telling us about the problem.
Not the book you’re looking for?
Preview — Size by Vaclav Smil |
|
Quotes by David Wineberg
(?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads.
(Learn more)
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who understand the climate is changing, and those who watch Fox News.”
― David Wineberg, The Straight Dope: What I Learned From My First Thousand Nonfiction Reviews
― David Wineberg, The Straight Dope: What I Learned From My First Thousand Nonfiction Reviews
tags:
climate-change,
environment
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who understand the climate is changing, and those who watch Fox News.”
― David Wineberg, The Straight Dope: What I Learned From My First Thousand Nonfiction Reviews
― David Wineberg, The Straight Dope: What I Learned From My First Thousand Nonfiction Reviews
tags:
climate-change,
environment
Goodreads Authors/Readers
— 51587 members
— last activity 2 hours, 8 min ago
This group is dedicated to connecting readers with Goodreads authors. It is divided by genres, and includes folders for writing resources, book websit This group is dedicated to connecting readers with Goodreads authors. It is divided by genres, and includes folders for writing resources, book websites, videos/trailers, and blogs. Feel free to invite some friends to join our Round Table community!http://www.goodreads.com/group/invite_members/26989-goodreads-authors-readers -Vincent Lowry (Moderator, Author, & Photographer) *Masthead photo: Taos, NM (c) 2021 by Vincent Lowry Slide Show: http://youtu.be/QKOPP4kIGLc Authors and readers are invited to check out these additional links: 1) The Author Resource Round Table on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_folder/116489?group_id=26989 2) The E-Author Resources blog: http://eauthorresource.wordpress.com/ 3) The Book Video blog: http://ratemybookvideo.wordpress.com/ ...more
Goodreads Librarians Group
— 248256 members
— last activity 0 minutes ago
Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: * Adding new books or editions * Editing book information (including covers) * Combining and merging book editions * Edits to page counts, quotes or awards * Correcting author profiles for authors not in the Goodreads Author Program If you're a Goodreads member with a new request, click Join Group. Once you're added to the group, you can post your question following this link. Simple requests (e.g. page count updates) typically take around 48 hours depending on the volume of requests, while more complex requests could take up to a couple of weeks (e.g. adding a new book). Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. Keep in mind that Librarians don't: * Grant or give insights into Librarian applications / Librarian status * Move ISBNs or ASINs between editions * Help with non-catalog Support questions (e.g. How do I reset my password?) For help with these queries or to submit general questions, comments or feature requests, try Goodreads Help or use the Contact Us form. If you're a Librarian and want to process requests, please refer to our Librarian Manual to ensure edits are performed in line with Goodreads policies. ...more
