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198213173X
| 9781982131739
| 198213173X
| 4.17
| 24,506
| Sep 15, 2020
| Sep 15, 2020
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it was amazing
| [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were [According to Jared Kushner] “In the beginning…20 percent of the people we had thought Trump was saving the world, and 80 percent thought they were saving the world from Trump. Now, I think we have the inverse. I think 80 percent of the people working for him think he’s saving the world, and 20 percent—maybe less now—think they’re saving the world from Trump.”-------------------------------------- Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”Bob Woodward has been reporting on American presidents for a long time. He and Carl Bernstein, reporters at The Washington Post, broke into public consciousness with their coverage of the Watergate scandal back in the early 1970s, culminating with their book, All the Presidents Men, one of the great political books of all time. In the intervening years Bob Woodward has continued covering politics in DC. He still holds the title of Associate Editor at the Post, but his production these days tends toward the long form. He has written 19 books since that first one. [image] Bob Woodward- image from The Guardian - photo by Christopher Lane In another collaboration with Carl Bernstsein, The Final Days, he wrote about Richard Nixon’s last year in power. Rage covers seven months of Donald Trump’s last year in office (unless the Donald manages to pull a coup out of a MAGA hat), so maybe The Penultimate Months, as of this writing. (November 2020, after Trump lost to Joe Biden) No talking to the presidential portraits this time. No excess consumption of liquid spirits. But, of course, one must always wonder what pharmaceuticals have been propping up the 45th president during the entirety of his term, so maybe. At least it is not something that is reported on or speculated about here. I am sure there will be more than a few reports, whether leaked to the press or included in memoirs, of Trump’s antics and gracious concession in the months after his electoral loss. Woodward had seventeen on-the-record conversations with Trump (that is what it says in the book flap, but on 60 minutes he says 18 and in the Axios interview he says 19) for this book, some in person, some by phone. “I call him the night prowler. I think it’s true. He doesn’t drink. He has this kind of savage energy and it comes through in some of the recordings I’ve released. It comes through in his rallies. So for me, it’s a window into his mind. It’s much like, as somebody said, the Nixon tapes where you see what he’s actually thinking and doing.” - from the Guardian interviewHe also had access to a vast range of official documents, and spoke with many others in the administration. While those conversations were conducted as “deep background,” it is pretty clear who made themselves available. Primary among these are Dan Coats, the erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, James Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Rex Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, even Jared Kushner, still the son-in-law. One can expect that they all want to portray themselves in the best possible light. I rolled my eyes a lot, particularly, when Jared was handed the mike. Woodward concentrates on their interactions with Trump, leaving aside many other issues relevant for each. Woodward shows the extreme degree of disorganization in the administration governed by impulse, the chaos that is the Trumpian way. It had Mattis sleeping at the job, terrified of an imminent nuclear war with North Korea during the period when the boss was joyfully taunting Kim Jung Un as “Little Rocket Man.” Most impressive is the tracking of Trump’s reaction to the Corona Virus Pandemic from January to July 2020. This permeates the book, which opens with Trump being informed by his National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, on January 28, 2020, that Corona would be the largest national security threat of his presidency. Matt Pottinger, the deputy National Security Advisor, a China expert, had done some research with his contacts in China, and reported to the president about having been told by a Chinese expert ”Don’t think SARS 2003…Think influenza pandemic of 2018”, which killed 675,000 Americans. Trump waited three days to close travel from China, and continued to downplay the disease in public in the months ahead. Most of the outrages emanating from this book have had their time in the media. Playing down the significance of the Corona Virus is first among these, as Trump claims that he did not want to panic the public. Utter nonsense, of course. He was more than happy to panic the public with apocryphal reports of an invasive caravan of immigrants approaching our southern border, for example. More recently he has tried panicking suburban women by claiming that their nice, safe, white burbs would soon be overrun by “those people,” were Joe Biden to be elected. The public is nothing more to Donald Trump than a collection of marks waiting to be conned. The only things Trump cared about re the pandemic were how an increase in C-19 cases would make him look, and its potential impact on the stock market. Maybe co-first was the game Trump played with North Korea, noted above, that brought the nation to the brink of nuclear war. In talking about the BLM movement, Woodward points out to Trump that they are both privileged, older white men who have, in a way, lived in a cave, with limited ability to understand the experience of people outside their group. “No,” Trump said. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you,” he said, his voice mocking and incredulous. “Wow, I don’t feel that at all.”The establishment of the Mueller Investigation in May 2017 was hailed as a triumph of institutional integrity over venal self-dealing. Turns out, not so much, despite the holy aura vested in the probe by the mainstream media. In fact, it was a dodge. There was a real investigation that had begun in the FBI, led by Andrew McCabe, a die-hard Republican, looking into the connections between Trump, his campaign, and Vladimir Putin. McCabe was seen as being too straight a shooter to be trusted with this, so establishing the probe was a way to push him to the side. During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on June 28, 2018, Republican representative from Florida Ron DeSantis…remarked to [Rod] Rosenstein, “They talk about the Mueller investigation—it’s really the Rosenstein investigation. You appointed Mueller. You’re supervising Mueller.”And Rosenstein made sure, by establishing a rigid chain of command, that McCabe would be kept well out of the loop. One of the more interesting items in the book, one not covered much in media, was the notion of controversy as an accelerant for policy positions. ”Controversy elevates message,” Kushner said. This was his core understanding of communications strategy in the age of the internet and Trump.And Trump is certainly a genius (however unstable) at creating and sustaining controversy. Michael Cohen, in his book Disloyal, makes the related point that Trump has always had a genius for manipulating the media. One does not think of Bob Woodward as being a particularly funny guy, but one of the things I enjoyed about the book was Woodward’s wry commentaries after reporting. There are many of these. Here is a small example: I told him people I talked to were saying the presidential race between him and Biden was now a coin toss.another “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”Woodward is indeed a master at getting people to talk, not that Donald Trump needs much prompting, particularly when the subject matter is his personal favorite. But Woodward demonstrates impressive patience and perseverance in coping with an interviewee who seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish. This talent is one that former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appreciated, in an interview with Mike Allen for Politico. "I think he's obviously a very astute journalist," Gates said to POLITICO's Mike Allen…"I would have really liked to recruit him for the CIA because he has an extraordinary ability to get otherwise responsible adults to spill [their] guts to him, on background, nothing there for the historians, but his ability to get people to talk about stuff they shouldn't be talking about is extraordinary and maybe unique." - from the Politico articleDonald Trump is an angry person. Always aggrieved, always looking to blame others for his failures, hurling invective and employing demagoguery to rouse an unanalytical base to support rank foolishness. Woodward opens the book with a couple of quotes by Trump about his capacity for inducing rage in people. It is certainly something at which he excels. But he remains clueless about how that works, which is no surprise, as Trump is clearly one of the least self-aware leaders we have ever had, hell, maybe one of the least self-aware people of his time. Here in November, 2020, as Trump does all he can to poison the democracy that elected him in 2016, as he does all he can to sow chaos in America’s foreign policy, as he does everything he can to seek revenge on government employees he deems insufficiently loyal, as he lies at an automatic firing rate that is impressive even for him, it is clear that along with disgust, the proper response to Trump is the one Woodward focuses on here. Rage will leave you more informed than you were before, but it will also leave you seething. If it does not, you are part of the problem. Review posted – 11/20/20 Publication date – 9/15/20 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----The Guardian - The right man for the job: how Bob Woodward pinned Trump to the page by David Smith -----NPR - Interview With Bob Woodward, Part 1 by Mary Louise Kelly audio + transcript ----------Part 2 -----60 Minutes - Inside Donald Trump's 18 recorded interviews with Bob Woodward for his book "Rage" by Scott Pelley -----Axios on HBO - Bob Woodward: Full interview, Part 1 by Jonathan Swan My reviews of other books by the author -----2018 - Fear -----2010 - Obamas’s Wars -----2008 - The War Within Other books on Trump -----Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump -----Disloyal by Michael Cohen -----A Warning by Anonymous -----Tyrannical Minds by Anonymous -----Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur There have been many books written about Trump and Trumpism, enough to warrant a shelf of their own. More particularly, there are two recent books, in addition to Rage, that have a lot to offer re getting a close, personal look at the man, Too Much and Never Enough, by Mary Trump, and Disloyal, by Michael Cohen. Both are well worth checking out. Items of Interest -----Washington Post - Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans by Robert Costa and Phil Rucker – This article includes links to tapes of some of Woodward’s conversations with Trump -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 02, 2020
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Nov 06, 2020
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Oct 02, 2020
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Hardcover
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B0881YDNDD
| 3.82
| 89,449
| Jul 14, 2020
| Jul 14, 2020
|
it was amazing
| As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.So, you think your family’s nuts? Usually we have to wait for historians to delve back through the years of a president’s life, digging through letters and writings, interviewing any who might have interacted with them, checking their letters and writings, to cull relevant bits, suss out impactful events, discern motivations and understand how that president came to make the decisions he (still only he) made. Also, sift fact from spin or worse in former presidents’ memoirs and other writings [image] Mary Trump - image from Inside Edition It is quite likely that Donald Trump may be the most written about person, let alone politician, in modern American history. And despite his attempts, many of them, sadly, all too successful, to protect his information from the world, (still waiting on those tax returns) there are so many eyes looking his way, so many searchlights in the darkness, that details continue to emerge, daily, it seems. But there are few who have the sort of access available to a family member. Reporters and historians did not have the personal experiences of dealing with him in a household setting. His remaining siblings have their own reasons to keep their counsel, despite the odd secretly-taped statement that finds its way to the public arena. But we have something pretty close, if a generation removed. Not a sibling, but Donald’s niece, Mary Trump, daughter of the eldest of Fred Trump’s children, Freddy. She is not only a family member but a clinical psychologist to boot. While she was not present when Donald was a child, (he was 19 when she was born) she was as familiar as one could be with family who had been, and had personal exposure to him all her life, in addition to the many tales she heard from family members of Donald’s earlier days. The stories she tells paint a picture of how Donald came to be the person he is. She does not offer a hard diagnosis on how much might be genetic and how much nurture, but the implication is clear that it was a substantial mix of both. Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.There are better sources for the details of Donald’s lifelong crime spree. What Mary Trump offers is a look into the poisoned tree from which this rotten apple dropped. One thing that stands out is that, even though Fred Sr encouraged all Donald’s worst qualities, there is rarely any sense that Donald had any positive ones beyond a superficial charm. In the Stephanopoulos interview, though, Mary talks about there having once been some kind inclinations in Donald, but they were squashed by his father. Even as a child, he delighted in bullying children smaller than himself, to the extent that Fred was encouraged to take him out of a school on whose board Fred sat. That must have been a fun conversation. Pop relocated Donald to the New York Military Academy, six miles north of West Point, in upstate New York. It was the equivalent of being sent to reform school for rich kids. A lot of the book focuses on Mary’s father, Freddy, the oldest of the siblings, the one expected to take over the business. He presumed he would be the head of his father’s company, but Pop never really gave him a chance, sticking him with relatively menial work. He was a kid who was kind, had friends, and interests other than his father’s business. This got him labeled as weak and a failure. Fred Senior preferred someone with what he considered a “killer” instinct, which translated into being as sociopathic as he was. He offered zero support for Freddy’s interest in flying, even though he had joined the United States Air Force ROTC in college and put in mad hours flying and training. Even after he secured a choice position as a pilot with TWA, the elite airline of the stars, flying their new 707 from Boston to Los Angeles, a pretty big deal at the time, his father regarded him as nothing more than a bus driver in the sky. But even after abandoning his flying career, and crawling back to his father, Fred Sr. never really gave him a chance at gaining any real authority. Donald, the second son, eight years younger, was more than happy to step into the favorite son shoes. He clearly had the temperament, the narcissism and malignant regard for others that his father so wanted to see in a successor. Mary offers some details on the business disasters that Donald wrought, his business talent pretty much as non-existent as his talent for dishonesty and self-promotion was vast. Even Mary bought into the spin for a long time, not realizing that Fred Sr. had been keeping Donald afloat with hundreds of millions in loans and often illegal gifts. It was when Donald asked her to ghostwrite one of his books that she did some actual research into him, followed him around, and realized just what a totally empty suit he truly was. There are plenty of quotes from this book making the rounds, a passel of stories. I will spare you the full list. But there are few things worth noting. ----------Donald’s disregard for women tracks with his father’s disregard for his wife, and even Donald’s dismissive treatment of her. ----------Donald even tried to steal his siblings’ inheritance, a ploy that was only sidetracked because Fred Sr was having a rare lucid day and smelled a rat, when his lawyer, whom Donald had recruited for this will-rewrite task, asked him to sign some papers. It was Donald’s mother who saw to it that the plot was foiled. ----------It is telling to see how Donald has recreated in his role as president the model set by his father for always keeping his children from any feeling of security. ----------He has inherited pop’s complete incapacity and/or unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his actions. But at some point you become responsible for yourself, and it is clear that whether he has the capacity or not, Donald never will. He will remain a spoiled child, a bully, a danger to anyone near him, and now, as someone with the instruments of national power at his disposal, an actual menace to the planet. One of the overarching feelings I had while reading this book was sadness. However awful Donald is today (and has been almost all his life), it is still a very sad thing for anyone to grow up in a household where a father’s love was not only unavailable, but in which even wanting such affection would be considered a sign of weakness, and cause for rejection and humiliation. Add to this a mother whose narcissism combined with physical illness to ensure that their interactions would be all about her, and never about him. Mary’s relationship with her grandmother, Donald’s mother, is also heart-breaking. Materials from the book are all over the print and digital media. The understandable focus there is on the actual content of the book. What happened, where, and when, what was said, by whom? How did Donald become so awful and what awful things has he done or said that we do not yet know about? Usually unmentioned, or maybe noted in passing, is what a bloody good read this book is. I found myself rapt while poring through it, and not just fascinated by the major multi-car pileup that is Donald’s life, but actually moved, particularly by the other main story Mary tells, that of her father’s demise. What a waste of a life, of an opportunity, and at the hands of madness. Trumps are not known for writing their own books. But Mary had an interest rarely, if ever, seen in the Trump family. It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interviewWhile Mary Trump does not have the objectivity of a true outsider looking at the family, that does not mean that she leaves her clinical toolbox unopened. She has a PhD in clinical psychology. She has observed and had reliable reports on a large swath of Donald’s life, and the lives of other family members, a solid grounding for offering a very well-informed, and analytically incisive, opinion about Donald and other family members. Her personal take on 45 is the best we are likely to ever have in terms of understanding the psychological roots and early journey into madness of our Psycho President. It is a frightening picture. We can only hope that we all get to live long enough to fully appreciate just how valuable it is. Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder. Review first posted – September 10, 2020 Publication date – July 14, 2020 [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages Interviews -----ABC News – with George Stephanopoulos - George is a bit hostile, but it is a good interview overall -----Financial Times - Mary Trump: ‘At Least the Borgias supported the arts’ by Edward Luce -----The Guardian - Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’ by David Smith -----Mother Jones - Watch: Mary Trump on Why Donald Trump Lies, Why He’s “Racist,” and Why She Wrote Her Book by David Corn -----MSNBC has chopped up Rachel Maddow’s interview with the author into bits. If I find a complete vid of that interview, I will add it here. Items of Interest -----Wikipedia entry for The Trump Family -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 24, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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Sep 05, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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0771005857
| 9780771005855
| 0771005857
| 3.91
| 14,297
| Jul 21, 2020
| Jul 21, 2020
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it was amazing
| “The post-1989 liberal movement—this was the exception,” Strathis Kalyvas said. Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liber “The post-1989 liberal movement—this was the exception,” Strathis Kalyvas said. Unity is an anomaly. Polarization is normal. Skepticism about liberal democracy is also normal. And the appeal of authoritarianism is eternal-------------------------------------- Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.Anne Applebaum, erstwhile Thatcherite, long-time conservative, spouse to the former foreign minister of Poland, journalist, historian, onetime member of The Washington Post editorial board, Pulitzer Prize winner, staff writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at The Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University of Advanced International Studies, offers an inside look at the extant wave of authoritarianism that is washing across the planet. It has picked up steam since the time when she was writing for right-wing propaganda newspapers and palling around with the likes of Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham. She looks at then versus now, and how it came to be that what she believed to be actual conservatism, as in wanting to conserve established norms, institutions, and values, transformed into a push toward dictatorship across the planet. [image] Anne Applebaum - image from The Guardian - Photograph: Piotr Malecki …these movements are new. There was no authoritarian-nationalist antidemocratic wave after 1989 in central Europe, outside of ex-Yugoslavia. It has arisen more recently, in the past decade. And it arose not because of mythical “ghosts from the past” but as a result of specific actions of people who disliked their existing democracies. They disliked them because they were too weak or too imitative too indecisive or too individualistic—or because they personally were not advancing fast enough within them.She cites research indicating that in any country there is about one third of the population that has what can be called an “authoritarian predisposition,” having nothing to do with political policies. One could be of this type and be a Republican or a Democrat. Such folks favor homogeneity and order, and have a low tolerance for diversity. We can see this in the blatant racism of the right with no trouble at all, but it can also be present in some progressives who insist that older people, for example, should step aside, so they can fill their shoes, that older people cannot possibly understand their needs or perspectives, or that moderate Democrats are quislings who should be driven from the party. It ain’t just the other guys, folks. We have such people across the political spectrum. But they are certainly more manifest, and have achieved considerably more notoriety under the Republican red flag than under any other, by a long shot. So, there are people who are ok with simple answers to complex problems and we will always have that third to contend with. But one third of the population is not sufficient to gain power. And we presume that there is a corresponding third that tilts the other way, that welcomes diversity and difference, and can handle complexity. So, what is left is that middle ground. How does a wanna-be authoritarian or authoritarian-curious party reach them? In ancient Rome, Caesar had sculptors make multiple versions of his image. No contemporary authoritarian can succeed without the modern equivalent: the writers, intellectuals, pamphleteers, bloggers, spin doctors, producers of television programs, and creators of memes who can sell his image to the public. Authoritarians need the people who will promote the riot or launch the coup. But they also need the people who can use sophisticated legal language, people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do. They need people who will give voice to grievances, manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear, and imagine a different future. They need members of the intellectual and educated elite, in other words, who will help them launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, even if that includes their university classmates, their colleagues, and their friends.Applebaum reports on French essayist Julien Benda, who wrote about the people who supported authoritarianism in the 1920s. He saw intellectuals supporting class or national passion (communist or nationalist) as a motivating force, and betraying the true intellectual’s work, the search for truth. He called them clercs, idealogues of the left and right. While there are seams of authoritarianism in both left and right in today’s world, it is the seam of the right that has become dominant, only the right-wing clercs, who have attained any power. She looks at the experience of several nations, Poland, Spain, the UK, Hungary and others, including the USA, finding commonalities in how once reasonable people demagnetized their moral compasses (presuming they ever really had any) and found that they were perfectly fine with the most brazen public expressions of bigotry, racism, and allegiance to party lies, as long as it brought them greater personal wealth and/or influence. Applebaum uses as point of reference a party she and her husband had held in Poland to welcome in the new millennium. There were politicos of diverse (albeit heavily-rightward-tilted) sort at this gathering. She uses some of the attendees as examples of how people with whom she was once friends, or at the very least collegial, had turned to the dark side. She tells of one woman, who had gone so far that she was publicly proclaiming anti-semitic fabrications, including accusing Applebaum, who is Jewish, of being at the center of an anti-government cabal. There are more of these. I particularly enjoyed reading about Boris Johnson, who knew that Brexit was a stupid idea, but who promoted it anyway, because doing so appealed to the people he had been trying to build support from. He totally expected to fail. There is more on Boris, none of which was really at all surprising in such a Trump-level narcissist. She also points out that authoritarian governments value one thing over all else, loyalty. Remind you of any erstwhile presidents? Qualifications will always be considered secondary, and thus such governments will enter a spiral of incompetence and failure. How’s Rudy workin’ out for ya as legal counsel? How did that handling Covid thing work out? Such rightward movements have more moving parts and Applebaum looks into the roots of some of these. She considers, for example, the sort of nostalgic yearning for a golden ideal state that is just fine with glossing over the actual reality of the favored era, and points out that such imaginary realms run into a problem when confronted with what has happened since then, since, if it was such a great time, why then did it not persist? Which warms us up for conspiracy theories. The past really was great, but there were people determined to ruin it. Thus, we have QAnon, Newsmax, Fox, OANN, Breitbart, et al, which have all done quite well building up their brand by tearing down reason. While a few with remnants of consciences have headed for the doors of such places, there has been no shortage of demagogues banging down those same doors for a chance to rouse the rabble with lies and misdirection, fine representatives of the clercs of Julian Benda’s 1920s analysis, in it for personal greed and power. Why is it that so many of the implementers and mouthpieces of the right are such nasty, awful people? I expect that this public vitriol is a somatization of the internal moral battle they are engaged in. Some element of decency must remain, so that when they publicly lie, relentlessly, they need to assuage whatever smidgen of guilt they still might feel, by going so much overboard as to drown out that tiny remnant voice. (Maybe it is Don Junior’s conscience that dopes him up before public orations?) They know they are doing something wrong and need to silence any internal moral objections. And then there are people who manage to promote evil without the bombast. Think Steven Miller. In people such as these, it is clear, the internal drowning has been completed. There is no longer a need to stifle the cries of a murdered ethos. Religion is also a popular motivating factor. There is nothing less equitable, less democratic, than a group that thinks it has the creator on speed-dial. Authoritarianism fits quite nicely with a world view that insists that all laws come from on high. As is often the case when reading a book by a conservative, my hackles were raised on multiple occasions. In one she writes: They are…a specific kind of right, one that has little in common with most of the political movements that have been so described since the Second World War. British Tories, American Republicans, East European anti-Communists, German Christian Democrats, and French Gaullists all come from different traditions, but as a group they were, at least until recently, dedicated not just to representative democracy, but to religious tolerance, independent judiciaries, free press and free speech, economic integration, international institutions, the transatlantic alliance, and a political idea of “the West.”While there are some differences for sure, I am not so certain the ultimate difference, in many respects, is really all that deep. Even though she mentioned it a little before this in the book I guess she quickly forgot that the American electoral college system is an enemy of representative democracy, one that Republicans will never allow to be changed. I guess she missed the Willie Horton campaign of GHW Bush. I guess she missed the part of American history in which Republican nominees to the Supreme Court had to align with a religion-based anti-abortion policy to even be considered. This is not a new right she is describing. It is the old right without the veneer of caring what anyone thinks. Sure, there were some who would occasionally stand for decency, McCain on the attempt to revoke Obamacare and Romney on impeachment, but look at the other policies they promote, and it is the same old Republican assaults on civil liberties, environmental safety, and worker rights, no longer afraid to goose-step in public, and having recruited a lot more people who are more than happy, and now prepared, to wear their brown shirts outside their basements and private clubs. It does feel at times like an argument about which of the farmers will be cutting off the chickens’ heads. Not something we chickens are likely to be particularly concerned about. Another: Two decades ago, different understandings of “Poland” must already have been present, just waiting to be exacerbated by chance, circumstance, and personal ambition. Before Trump’s election, different definitions of what it means to be “American” were on offer as well. Even though we fought a civil war that struck powerfully against the nativist, ethnic definition of what it means to be an American, it lived on long enough to be reincarnated in 2016. The Brexit vote and the chaotic debates that followed are proof that some older ideas about England and Englishness, long submerged into a broader definition of “Britain,” also retain a powerful appeal. The sudden support for Vox is a sign that Spanish nationalism did not disappear with Franco’s death. It merely went into hibernation.Really? She ignores the fact that in the USA, far from retreating to underground dens for protracted periods of rest, the forces of darkness have never stopped promoting their views. From the Civil War to the KKK to Reconstruction to the racism of the Palmer raids, to the Bund to McCarthyism, to the Kochs, to the Tea Party, to Qanon. There has never been a time when the right has been quiet in the states. There has never been a time when they were shy about lying. The current level of 24/7/365 mendacity and provocation is merely a continuation of the same approach, but on a steroidal level facilitated by the internet, encouraged by corporations like Facebook and Twitter that profit from the growing madness, and merrily abetted by their new best friend, Vladimir Putin. Ok, so I have my gripes, and no doubt will never see eye to eye with Applebaum on many subjects. But overall, this is a riveting read, from a serious thinker on such subjects. It is a useful insight to identify, and place in historical perspective, those who are doing their best to sell themselves to liars, racists, and demagogues for personal gain, the public good be damned. I have great respect for her analytical acuity and observational power. Twilight of Democracy will give you insights into some of the troubles of our time, raise your blood pressure, and, hopefully, make you rage, rage against the dying of the light. Above all, the old newspapers and broadcasters created the possibility of a single national conversation. In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts…False, partisan, and often misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up. And even if they could, it no longer matters: a part of the public will never read or see fact-checking websites, and if they do they won’t believe them. Review posted – 12/4/20 Publication dates ----------July 21, 2020 - hardcover ----------June 22, 2021 - trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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it was amazing
| Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space. What’s reall Since the Cold War, bunkers had never really disappeared: the subsurface of the earth continues to be a geological-geopolitical space. What’s really different now is that, globally, bunkers are being built by a wide range of government, corporate, and private actors all over the world. Ranging from new government DUMBS (Deep Underground Military Bases) to tiny walk-in-closet panic rooms, contemporary bunkers are as ubiquitous as they are diverse.There are plenty of us who worry about the potential for doomsday-like events, whether from natural catastrophes like an incoming space rock, the blowing of super-volcanoes, global pandemic, or unnatural ones like nuclear war, global warming, the escape of designer germs or nano-things, the rise of AI, zombie-apocalypse, apes gaining higher-level sentience, alien invasion, collapse of social order, or many, many more scenarios that threaten us all. As you may note, not all of these possibilities have remained in the layer of the theoretical. But not all of us resort to planning to bug out to a personal safe space, whether in the basement, backyard, former missile silo, or reinforced concrete underground city, to ride out the storm, or relocate permanently, whether nearby or someplace off shore, or in New Zealand, the geographic center of the USA, deep in the heart of Texas, or maybe deep below the city you already live in. Bunker is about those who do. [image] Bradley Garrett - Image from the Guardian – photo by Bill Green Bradley Garrett has a PhD in Social and Cultural Geography from the University of London. He is best known for Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City, which looks at hidden parts of cities. Of course, the physical research required for such undertakings required a fair bit of trespassing. (His Tedx talk addresses this in some detail). And he engaged in some for this undertaking, but, for the most part, Garrett was welcomed in his explorations this time. He is interested not only in the physical elements of bunkers, but also the socio-economic, the political, and the anthropological. Garrett’s interest in survivalism was sparked by the discovery of a giant bunker under Corsham in Wiltshire, built by the government during the Cold War. “We went down there with crowbars and prised the doors open. We found these electric buggies, stuck a screwdriver in and hotwired them and drove them around,” he says. “It has 97km of roads, connecting radiobroadcasting stations, beds and an underground reservoir. It’s an underground city.” - from The Times vis Scribd articleWho builds them? A lot of these facilities are repurposed government sites, from missile silos to deep storage facilities. Unused subway infrastructure is a nice backup for those in large cities. Some are built by religious institutions, particularly those anticipating dark days ahead. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the Mormons, has a considerable plan working for preserving their culture, producing and distributing needed supplies, and helping others outside their community. They are not the only group with such a perspective. [image] Splashing out on doom ... the pool at Larry Hall’s 60-metre Survival Condo underground bunker in Kansas - Image and descriptive text from The Guardian - Photograph: SurvivalCondo.com What Are they for? Survival, obviously. Short term or long. Large scale or not. Staying shielded from radiation, fire, hordes of those lacking the proper credentials. Not all missile silos have been sold off. Not all hardened supply depots are now in private hands. But states are not necessarily looking out for their actual citizenry. In the USA and UK, for example, the focus is more on Continuation of Government (COG) and securing reserve military control and capacity than protecting every Tom, Dick and buh-bye. One generic example of this is DUMBS, or Deep Underground Military Bases. There are many. This is something Doctor Strangelove certainly supported. It became clear in the 1960s, with the declassification of information about large government-built bunkers in Virginia and Vermont, bunkers intended to protect government officials, that most people were being left to their own devices. This had become official policy in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower saw a cost estimate of $300 billion to bunker-protect the entire US population from a nuclear war. He opted instead to spend $2.5 million to encourage people to build their own. Not to worry, you’ll be fine. [image] B-207 – where Garrett stayed at xPoint - image from his site Some places are more concerned about citizens surviving. Switzerland, for example, mandates bunker shelter for 200,000 more people than the total population of the country. North Korea is the most bunkered place on the planet. Go ahead, nuke them. They will all be underground already. If KJU fantasizes that he can win a nuclear war, this is why. North Korea might actually survive a US attack. In Israel all new homes must include a bunker room. There is an interesting bit on Singapore, given its shortage of real estate, looking to protect its citizens by building geoscrapers into the ground. If they can match the grandeur of their above-ground architecture, that should be something worth seeing. [image] Milton Torres (lounging at right) quit his job in Chicago to live full-time in this bunker at the XPoint "survival community" in South Dakota. "I close the door and stay in there for a few days and then I can think again," he says, as the site's developer boasts that sales of the $35,000 dwellings are up "over 600 percent" in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - Image and descriptive text from the New York Post In addition to the sites noted above, some private entities build hardened concrete structures into, although not necessarily entirely under, the ground. These would be the larger, communal sorts of facilities for dozens to maybe 150 people, which can be rather nice. Others can be grandiose tin cans that offer a few people little more than a temporary and ill-informed sense of security buried in their back yard, or a place in which serial killers can stash their victims and nefarious supplies. Lower tiers of bunkering include panic rooms and hardened basements. [image] Image from the film Parasite Another tier altogether is mobile bunkers, mega-vehicles that would be at home in any Mad Max Movie. Although people sometimes let their paranoia fuse with their mechanical creativity with dire results. One fellow made himself a killdozer and took out his considerable rage on the town he felt had done him wrong, Kranby, CO. Who wants them? Governments have a particular need to keep on keeping on. In the private marketplace, preppers come in all shapes and sizes, well, maybe not all. Mostly in the range from InfoWars fans to almost-InfoWars fans among the rank and file of believers. But there is a considerable representation of the very wealthy, for whom the large sums required for a serious bunker are not an impediment. Larger in numbers are those more fringy sorts, who have been breathlessly waiting for the Second Coming, the Fourth Turning, the general collapse of western civilization or things of that nature, doomsteaders. There are also, I was surprised to learn, some preppers who were more rational about it all, I got the sense that these preppers were operating on a variation of Pascal’s wager: the precept that even if the existence of a higher power is unlikely the potential upsides of believing in one are so vast that we might as well. If these preppers were right about some, or just one, of their theories, then they all just might survive a cataclysm—it’s a payoff for faith that costs little in the present. [Well, it is actually pretty clear that the cost is considerable, but maybe not for the very wealthy.]Who sells them? One of the primary subjects Garrett addresses is people who sell. Doomsday capitalists promote the notion that the big shitstorm is certainly coming. We just do not yet know exactly when, and don’t you want to be prepared? As if doomsday capitalists was not catchy enough, Garrett has settled on dread merchants for this group. They are a colorful crew, with high representation by real estate salesmen. Some are actually legit. They are fun to read about, a Damon-Runyon-esque collection. Where Are they? Garrett covers considerable territory in his global bunker scan. That is not to say that he visited everywhere he writes of. He spent time in South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Tennessee, Kansas, the DC Area, West Virginia, Australia, Bath, in the UK, Berlin, and Thailand, mostly looking at actual bunker sites or prospective sites, but also meeting with developers, and preppers related to the whole bunker industry. He also writes about places he has not visited, at least not for this project, including Moscow, North Korea, Montana and others. But I would bet that there are bunkers, bunker enthusiasts, and bunker-promoters pretty much everywhere. When did this begin? As long as there have been people, there have been reasons to hunker in a bunker, whether to keep away from cave bears, saber toothed cats or raiders from the next community over. Garrett does not go that far back, but he does make use of his academic licks to offer up a fascinating history of bunker-building through the ages, as far back as Roman-era Anatolia and Pompei. The contemporary push to dig in exploded with the nuclear bomb. He does point out that we are increasingly looking to protect ourselves from a hostile world. By the year 2000, a third of all new homes in the United States were being built in gated communities: a kind of social-contract failure architecture in which every community must fend for itself.So, is it safe? I was very excited to read this book on learning of its availability. I am totally thrilled to have been given the chance. I knew next to nothing about the whole prepper culture and global bunker spread previously. Gap filled. It is clear that Garrett is sympathetic with the mindset of many of the preppers, the saner ones, anyway. While I expect that most of us see most preppers are paranoids, it is clear that there are many who are not, who view prep-culture and arranging for a bunker if the world goes sideways as a sort of insurance policy, a smart investment, just in case, particularly for those with considerable means. You will learn a lot about a subculture that is unfamiliar, and maybe appreciate some perspectives that you had not really ever considered. I had a bit of discomfort with the author, who I take to be a Libertarian sort, particularly when he gleefully announces that he has no intention of paying off his student loans. (page 88) And there is the odd political analysis that seemed a bit too much. But, really, those did not at all take away from the upside of learning all that Garrett has to teach us. So yeah, you might want to hunker down in a safe place for a few hours. Make sure you have plenty of water, or whatever might be your beverage of choice, enough chow to last you for the entirety of your reading session, make sure the doors and power supply are properly secured, switch on a light, get comfortable and dig in. What you unearth will repay your investment. “I know that in the after time I’ll just kill, which is why I don’t want to shoot this pistol, I can’t break that seal yet,” Blake said, pulling it from the shoulder holster. “When the time comes, though, I won’t feel remorse, I won’t feel bad, I’ll kill anybody that gets in my way. I’ll kill anybody that tries to get in this facility, and I won’t think twice about it. There won’t be any conversation, just action. The only thing stopping me doing that now are the consequences—in the after time there will be no consequences. What there will be is survival. Review posted – September 25, 2020 Publication dates ----------August 4, 2020 - hardcover ----------August 3, 2021 - trade paperback I received a copy of this book from Scribner in return for a review that dug beneath the surface of the book, which I tried to do. Can I come out now? And thanks to MC. You know who you are. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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it was amazing
| I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afrai I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case.Ilhan Omar arrived in the United states at age twelve. She and her family members were refugees from Somalia. Omar attended her first political caucus at fourteen, (acting as an interpreter for her grandfather) became a citizen at seventeen, a representative in the Minnesota House of Representatives at thirty-four and a Representative to the United States Congress at thirty-six. She established a couple of firsts in Minnesota, first Somali-American and first naturalized citizen from Africa to be elected to office, and she is one of the first two Muslim women elected to the national House of Representatives. Considering where she began, it is remarkable that she has been able to achieve as much as she has. [image] Representative Ilhan Omar - Image from The New Yorker This is What America Looks Like is Omar’s charming, very readable memoir, of her early life in Somalia, the immigration travails her family endured in trying to reach the United States, the adjustments she had to make in adapting to her new home, becoming an American, getting an education, finding a calling in public service and political activism, and working her way into the United States Congress. It is a classic rags-to-riches (well, not entirely, but more on that in a bit) story of someone who, with some help, pulled herself up by her bootstraps, made a home, and has done everything she can to make the district she represents and her new country a better place. [image] The board outside Omar’s Congressional office - Image from RollCall.com The book opens with a very charming tale of how constituents, and supporters from across the world covered the nameplate outside her office with Post-it notes carrying words of support. This caused a brief run-in with building maintenance, as, even with her staff relocating these messages to a space inside her office, the board kept filling up with new ones. This is an excellent omen, an accurate predictor of what a lovely read this book is. Not all fluff, of course. Much of what Omar writes about is deadly serious, but this is not a political tract. It really is about her life before her public service, and what made her the person she is now, chronicling the challenges she had to overcome to be in a position to do some good on a national level. One challenge was having to learn English. In her interview with Elle Magazine, she was asked about the particular show she watched that helped her master the language. The show was "Baywatch," the earlier years. [image] Rep. Ilhan Omar and her then two-year-old daughter, Isra Hirsi, on a trip to Sweden in 2005 – image from Elle Magazine We can expect that in any political memoir, there will be a lot of self-aggrandizement, in the same way that resumes tend to portray as wonderful parts of our lives that could use a bit of burnishing. But we do not really expect much by way of the less cheery side of her life. In addition to fleeing Somalis under fire, and surviving in refugee camps, she spends some time on her marriages, and even on a nervous breakdown that included, among other bad decisions, shaving her head. While she does not devote a lot of ink to this side of her experience, she certainly offers enough, and shows some guts in doing so. She also takes on the political mis-step that occurred when she suggested that the impact of AIPAC was at least in part due to the PACs monetary influence. She was immediately schooled on some of the terminology she had used, and offered a sincere sorry-now-I-know-better apology. She focuses a lot on her combativeness, a trait she had from a very early age. (See the quote at the top of this review) It’s a feature not a bug, and one that any effective legislator should have, to at least some degree. How much was from her mother dying when she was two? How much from spending more time with boys than girls? How much was innate is impossible to tell, but her assertiveness was very-much supported in Somalia by family who adored her, her father and grandfather in particular. Both men were educated. Her father worked in a government job helping to run the nation’s lighthouse network. Grandfather was particularly unusual in that he treated the women and girls in his family as equals. It is unclear how much difference was made by the fact that the family was relatively well-to-do, enough to have their own driver. But surely all contributed to constructing the Ilhan Omar we know. The tale of her four-year experience in refugee camps is chilling. A very close family member died there, along with many others who were carried off by starvation and disease. For a child who grew up in a relatively comfortable family, she has seen her share of hardship and human misery. Those experiences fuel her progressive legislative interests today. Studying nutrition, and working as a community nutrition educator in Minneapolis for several years in order to teach poor immigrants about what foods to buy, and how to prepare them, gave her an appreciation for the needs of the US-born poor as well as the challenges faced by new arrivals. But it was in community organizing that she found her real passion. Her experience in Somalia, in the camps and in American schools gave her plenty of experience contending with bullies. In a precinct caucus in 2014 she was beaten up by five people who were opposed to the candidate whose campaign she was managing. Her description of the politics within the Minneapolis Somali immigrant community was news to me and very eye-opening. It was also news to me that Omar has been able to work with legislators from across the aisle in both the Minnesota and United States Houses of Representatives to craft legislation. Hardly the extremist her opponents see through their red-tinted glasses. I never really found the idea of compromise to be a difficult one. I think oftentimes there are battles, and you have to pick which one to fight today and which one to live on to fight another day. There are seeds we have to plant in order for there to be an opportunity for someone to enjoy that shade tomorrow. - from the Salon interviewAnd it was even greater news to learn that one of her personal political heroes was a powerful leader from a conservative party. You will be very surprised when you find out who. On June 16, 2020, Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, 67, died of complications from Covid-19. Her relationship with her father is a very considerable element in this book, as it has been in her life. She respected and dearly loved her father, whose good opinion she cherished more than anyone’s. …with God, you can always pray. You can ask for forgiveness. But when Dad walked away, there was no begging for forgiveness. I never wanted to get myself in that position. - from the Salon interview [image] Omar with her father - image from CNN This is What America Looks Like is a remarkable political memoir. It is a very fast read. I blasted through this book in record time, for me, no skimming. Many readers could get through it in a single session. The odds are that you do not know all that much about Omar’s background. I know I didn’t, and I am someone who attends to things political more than the average reader. So there is that. You will learn about who she is beyond who she endorsed in this or that electoral race, what her positions are on a small list of national policy issues, and how the right chooses to vilify her, with their usual degree of honesty. Ilhan Omar has a remarkable story to tell and she tells it exceedingly well. Check this one out. You will not be sorry. Review first posted – June 19, 2020 Publication dates ----------May 26, 2020 - hardcover ----------July 27, 2021 - trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You might check out the comments added to images IO posted on Instagram, for a flavor of the sort of frothing, psychotic hatred she must endure, thinly veiled death threats included. Some could make a nice bit on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets. Some, of course would be better off referred to the FBI for investigation. Interviews -----Elle - An Intimate Conversation Between Rep. Ilhan Omar and Her Daughter, Isra Hirsi by Isra Hirsi – Omar’s 17-year-old daughter -----NPR - Ilhan Omar On Her Memoir And Moving The Needle Toward Progressive Policies -----Salon - Rep. Ilhan Omar talks Trump: "People are ready for someone who isn't triggered" - by Dean Obeidallah -----LA Review of Books - That Better America for Everyone: Talking to Representative Ilhan Omar by Andy Fitch - outstanding and informative Items of Interest -----Literary Hub - an excerpt - Ilhan Omar on Her Early Days Getting Out the Vote -----The New Yorker - The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar by Masha Gessen – at the end of her piece Gessen says She performs neither humility nor gratitude. Specifically, as it pertains to Nancy Pelosi, there are passages in the book that constitute considerable public gratitude. So, given that Gessen wrote her piece in April 2019, it would seem that Omar has learned a thing or two since being elected to Congress. -----Vox - The controversy over Ilhan Omar and AIPAC money, explained by Matthew Iglesias -----The Guardian - The Squad: progressive Democrats reveal how they got their name by Edward Helmore -----Omar speaking out against destruction of property during protests -----Omar interviewed by Jake Tapper on What De-funding a Police Department looks like - a good look at a movement with a terrible slogan -----Omar quoted Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise in response to Trump-rally brownshirts chanting “Send her back” ...more |
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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Hardcover
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1640093141
| 9781640093140
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| 4.27
| 202
| Jun 02, 2020
| Jun 02, 2020
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it was amazing
| What do you do when you have nothing left? Nowhere to go? What kind of person are you forced to become? What do you do when you have nothing left? Nowhere to go? What kind of person are you forced to become?This is a tale of two desperate men, driven from their homeland by greed and inhumanity, seeking a new life in a new place. But there are no direct flights from the one to the other, not for working class people like Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal. Theirs is an odyssey that takes them from Ghana to Brazil, through South and Central America and into the United States, where we first meet them. [image] Joe Meno - image from Counterpoint Seidu and Razak had first met each other in a Minneapolis bus station. Out of options in the US, both were determined to cross into Canada, neither knowing much about how to go about it. As they head to the border they must walk the last batch of miles on foot, in the face of a withering winter storm, with sub-zero temperatures and cruel winds, lacking the extra protective clothing anyone would need to survive such an ordeal. It is this life and death struggle which opens the book and to which we return at the end of most chapters. How could anyone survive such conditions? Do they make it? And if either of them does, at what cost? The bulk of the book is their alternating personal histories and subsequent horror stories. Ever since he was a kid, Seidu had been a gifted footballer. He aspired to play professionally, and did, in Ghana. We follow his career as he steadily moves up to more competitive teams. When offered a chance to try out for a professional Brazilian team, he travels there with his coach. But his life takes a dramatic turn when that coach catches him in bed with a man. This might be a scandal in many countries, but for a Ghanaian, it is life-threatening. Publicly outed as a bisexual, he could be arrested back home, beaten, jailed, maybe even killed. His coach has made it clear that he will broadcast this to everyone in Ghana. Seidu’s career in his home country is over, and probably any hopes for a professional football career anywhere. Thus begins Seidu’s journey. [image] Seidu Mohammed – image from The Believer Razak Iyal’s problems were quite different, but no less terrifying. The first son of a man who remarried, having several more children, Razak is denied his inheritance when his father dies. His evil stepmother, incredibly selfish half siblings, indifferent, corrupt police and a corrupt political figure conspire to take what was rightfully his. His half-siblings threaten to kill him if he does not shut up about it. A few murder attempts later Razak flees the country. Their two stories follow a similar route and tell a similar tale. Both begin their American journey in Brazil, Seidu by happenstance, Razak by virtue of the fact that it was the only county to which he could get a visa. Theirs are horrifying stories of the perils of refugees seeking asylum. They are preyed upon by extortion-minded police and human traffickers in country after country, being repeatedly cheated, robbed, and attacked. The little solace they find comes mostly from fellow emigrants, and only rarely from locals. The misery may take a different form once they cross into the USA, but it is a horror story nonetheless. Both men have a deep religious faith, and turn to the almighty to see them through the worst of their travails, putting their fates in His hands. It looks like God could use a little help. Over the past thirty years a nearly invisible network of uncoordinated, small-scale smugglers had evolved into a highly organized enterprise. As the tide of migrants traveling to the United States grew throughout the twenty-first century, what was once a low-level, oftentimes family-run operation had become a multibillion-a-year business. Criminal organizations—including transnational drug traffickers—began to use human smuggling as an additional revenue source to support other illicit activities.The portrait painted here is of an enterprise that preys on the desperate. Not just the human traffickers and the thugs with whom they work, but the police who demand money from the migrants, using their government-sanctioned authority as a weapon against the defenseless. Meno points out that for many living in the communities the migrants traverse, feeding on the frightened and disarmed is among their few sources of income. It reminded me of lions feasting on wildebeests as they make their annual migrations. There was almost nothing to distinguish one country from another anymore. The sagging palm trees, their long leaves covered in dust; the rough, beige land; the cast-off clothes people wore; all of it was irreducible, continuous, a single continent that time had made plain by poverty. Dilapidated stores with metal bars covering their windows and doors, bleak-looking cell phone shops, travel agencies that appeared to have closed years before, all seemed strangely familiar. Shop after shop, business after business, built around the unending flood of migrants that passed along otherwise empty-seeming streets.When they finally present themselves to US officials at the border, expecting decent treatment, they are thrust into a proprietary detention system with a very Kafka-esque feel. Under current UN protocols, anyone who presents themselves at a port of entry or from inside the country can apply for asylum as long as they put forward an application within one year of their arrival.Thus begins a lengthy period in which they are incarcerated, denied legal assistance, lied to by prison authorities, and are largely cut off from contact with their families. Since opening in 1994, the Eloy facility has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Its existence, and the rapid development of many other private prisons and detention facilities over the past few decades, call into question the ethics of an industry that benefits from an inefficient immigration system. The more migrants who are detained, the longer the length of their detainment, the more these businesses have to gain. At any one time, nearly 40,000 asylum seekers are held in ICE facilities, with more than 70 percent of these individuals being imprisoned in privately run detention centers throughout the country.This is a non-fiction book written by a writer of fiction. I was totally taken in while reading, even though I knew when I started that this was a work of non-fiction, griping in my notes about how the author had reverted to an expository form at times. Oh, wait. So, you will be engaged. Seidu and Razak are decent people, everyman migrants faced with overwhelming and unfair obstacles. It is hard to read on with dry eyes, both during the darkness of the horrors they endure, and the much rarer bright lights of human empathy. Sadly, this epic struggle for freedom is a tale as old as humanity, or, in this instance, inhumanity. In bringing us the stories of these two desperate men, Joe Meno, in putting names and faces to the scourge of the global refugee crisis has shined a light on a particularly dark underside of the immigration experience. It is one that poor and working-class immigrants know all too well, but one that will come as a shock to most readers. The contemporary monetization of immigrant struggles has given us an exploitation-fueled Underworld Gauntlet in place of a hope-filled Underground Railroad. As troubling is that there are so many places on this planet where corruption rules, and decency, in order to survive, is forced to hide or flee, fueling the vast human migration we now have. We can only hope that this harsh, moving story can be shared with enough people that public concern will grow, and immigration policy can be moved from the draconian and profit-based to one that promotes a higher valuation of inherent humanity. This is a dark journey I urge you to make, through one of the outstanding books of 2020. The International Bill of Human Rights states Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. It would be a wonderful, and just thing, if that right were recognized in practice as well as in law, if we could offer more than Mr. Kurtz’s rueful final words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “'The horror! The horror!” Razak recalled the feelings he had faced back in Ghana, unable to negotiate the corrupt bureaucracy, the systems of power that had been put in place. He had traveled thousands of miles only to find, once again, his life beset with obstacles put down by outside forces, controlled by a faceless government. We can send you wherever we want. Review posted – May 29, 2020 Publication dates ----------June 2, 2020 - hardcover ----------June 22, 2021 - trade paperback I received a review copy of this book from Counterpoint. It was welcomed with open arms. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Joe Meno is an award winning novelist, short-fiction and comic-strip writer, playwright, and journalist. He teaches fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago. Between Everything and Nothing is his tenth book. By Joe Meno -----BelieverMag - an excerpt from the book -----Electric Lit - Pieces by Meno on this site ----- TriQuarterly - Homo Sapiens -----Goreyesque - The Use of Medicine -----Selected Shorts - Everything Strange and Unknown - audio – 30:59 -----This Land Magazine - Driver’s Ed Items of Interest -----The Universal Declaration of Human Rights -----The International Bill of Human Rights -----LitHub-Defining the Ethics of the Writer and Journalist’s Gaze by Spencer Wolff -----(view spoiler)[CBC - We can't forget about that night': 1 year later, refugees recall near-fatal Christmas Eve walk across border by Austin Grabish [image] Razak Iyal, left, and Seidu Mohammed, right, said they want to wish Canadians a happy holiday season and thank everyone who's helped them over the last year in Canada. - Image and text from the CBC article (hide spoiler)] -----California Sunday Magazine - “When can we really rest?” More migrants than ever are crossing the Colombia-Panama border to reach the U.S. Five days inside the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world by Nadja Drost - Photographs by Carlos Villalón, Bruno Federico, and Lisette Poole Books of Interest ----- The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad-full text on Gutenberg -----The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead -----A review of Exit West in The New Yorker - by JiaTolentino -----The Line Becomes a River ...more |
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May 17, 2020
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May 23, 2020
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May 22, 2020
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| 4.15
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| Apr 21, 2020
| Apr 21, 2020
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really liked it
| The will to survive is fundamental to us all. But in a life-or-death situation—when calm, careful planning, and logical thinking are what’s needed The will to survive is fundamental to us all. But in a life-or-death situation—when calm, careful planning, and logical thinking are what’s needed most—research shows that most of us will lose our shit.Evy Poumpouras is one tough broad. And she would like to help you become tough too. Of course, she wasn’t always as tough as she is today. Growing up a working-class kid in Queens, she lived in a world of restrictions. You can’t go here, or there, and certainly not there. She was even deprived of a chance to go Brooklyn Tech High School, one of the elite specialty high schools in the New York City Public School system, because her parents did not think it was safe for her to go to Brooklyn. She says that not wanting to live in fear was a motivating force in her eagerness to pursue a career in law enforcement, which she did, first with the NYC Police Department, and then with the US Secret Service, where she served for a dozen years. [image] Evy Poumpouras - image from her Instagram pages The book opens with her in the World Trade Center on 9/11, which she uses as an example of how training can come to the fore in a life and death situation. …when it seems like the world is ending, being willing to help others is the antidote to fearShe was awarded a Medal of Valor for her actions that day. The tale of her experiences there is both chilling and uplifting. There are two basic streams in Becoming Bulletproof. The first is the author’s memoir of seeking out a career in law enforcement and ultimately capping that with years of work in the Secret Service. This was fascinating, offering a look at what it really takes to become a cop or an agent in the USSS. In 2020 she co-hosted on Bravo’s reality series Spy Games. This last item is not given space in the book. She uses the challenges she faced in her career, having to overcome social, mental, and physical barriers, and just learning what agents learn, to reinforce the self-help message she is promoting. And that is the other stream here. Poumpouras writes about protecting yourself physically and mentally, and shows how you can influence others, and how others try to influence you. She writes about the three-F response to major stress, Fight, Flight, or Freeze. She offers sage advice on how to prepare for potentially stressful situations, and shows you how to dampen unhelpful reactions. There is excellent intel here on the importance of keeping on the move, whether coping with a shooter or a conversationally hostile actor. She even offers very useful information on securing your home. One of the things that self-help books offer is a quick way to get from here to there. In the case of Bulletproof, the author aims to show you how to become more inured to, and better prepared to cope with, the challenges life can throw at you, whether that might be an assassin attempting to take out the person you are protecting, or dealing with unpleasant people on line who attempt to draw you into no-win situations. The advice certainly seems reasonable enough. But, as with any such counsel, it can be a big leap from taking in some words on the page, and putting those words into action in a meaningful way. She writes of the hormetic effect of exposing yourself (or being exposed) to increasing levels of stress in order to build up a tolerance, so that when you are faced with a really stressful situation, you will be able to cope and not fall to pieces. This book is rich with the patois of the self-help genre – attitude, positivity, taking ownership, accepting responsibility, never giving up. There is a great list of suggestions for things to do and check when travelling, particularly abroad. But some seem bromitic, along the lines of “don’t let it throw you.” The bottom line for most self-help efforts is that it all comes down to the will of the reader. The advice can be divided into two categories, external actions you can take, things you can do that are pretty manageable and mostly a question of investing time and/or money. Others entail more personal challenges, and require more of a personal investment. The best advice in the world will not be particularly helpful if you lack the will to do what is suggested to achieve the desired results. There are enough specific suggestions here, however, that can be implemented, that can be learned, that it seems a worthwhile read even if you are not up to implementing all the recommedations. Sometimes, the advice could use a bit more nuance. For instance, there is a recommendation that one make eye contact when someone is making you feel uncomfortable. As many of us who have grown up in large cities (as the author did) can attest, it is often better to avoid eye contact, as eye contact is the route a certain sort of predator (or crazy person) uses to get you to stop moving, or to engage, when you really do not want to engage. Not all of us can rely on our well-honed combat skills to help us should our visual challenge to a predator be taken up. She offers excellent advice on how to handle yourself in an interview, as in when you are interviewing a suspect, the techniques also being quite useful when engaged in conversations in which you have a particular goal you want to achieve, whether persuading a person of something, or finding out something from or about them. She has a particularly sharp approach to getting a sense of when someone is lying, whether a suspect or your significant other. This is bolstered by an incisive description of body language, (aka paralinguistics) and how you can both use and interpret it. She honed this skill when she was an interrogator with the Secret Service. Of more interest, for me, anyway, is Poumpouras’s descriptions of preparations that are needed to make sure that this or that venue or travel route is safe for the VIP du jour, whether that be a member of the administration (or their families) or a foreign dignitary. Really interesting behind the scenes take there. There is a similar to-do list for regular folks planning foreign travel. I would definitely check that out. [image] Evy Poumpouras with then First Lady Michelle Obama - image from InStyle In keeping with tradition, this agent did not listen and tell. Loose lips may sink ships, and may be what makes DC go round, but you will be disappointed if you are hoping for dirt on the presidents (or other people) she has helped protect. She does, however, include a section near the end of the book in which she reports on some of the more laudable qualities manifested by those under her protection. It does not take a career in law enforcement to come up with some conclusions about which of these people she esteems more than others. While I was hoping that a higher percentage of the book would be on behind-the-scenes gossip and technique, there is still enough of that here (technique, not gossip). You will learn a bit about the Secret Service, which is a wonderful thing. Who doesn’t love learning something about a real world organization with the word “Secret” in its name? Poumpouras can indeed help you better defend yourself in the world, even if you do not take her up on all her recommendations. While she does not exactly exude warmth, I am not sure that is necessarily a desirable trait, anyway, in a book about hardening your defenses. Still, she comes across as a very real, very understandable person, someone who knows a lot and is eager to share. Becoming Bulletproof may or may not keep you from taking an incoming, but it can certainly improve your chances of being out of the line of fire. Review posted – May 1, 2020 Publication date – April 21, 2020 I received an ARE of this book from Atria, in return for…well, it seems that I am not allowed to tell you what I gave in exchange, if anything. Something about state secrets. But I can let you reach reasonable conclusions based on the evidence above. Ok? Can I say that? You will be stronger for having figured it out for yourself. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages Interviews -----Women of Impact - Former Secret Service Agent Shows You How to Get The Truth Out of Anyone | Evy Poumpouras - Lisa Bilyeu - Fun stuff on Sixth Sense – not in the book, and much more - this is a wonderful, longish interview, that will be well worth your time. If you watch only one interview it should be this one -----Steve TV - Evy Poumpouras Protects the President - with Steve Harvey – nice bit on physically protecting POTUS, but Harvey demonstrates his shallowness at the end of the segment -----MSN - Evy Poumpouras Was Ready To Face Death On 9/11 Songs/Music -----The Police - Every Breath You Take -----Sinatra - Someone to Watch Ove Me Items of Interest -----Spy Games -----People Magazine - Meet the Secret Service Agent Turned Bravo Star Helping Workers on the Coronavirus Frontlines ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 31, 2020
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Apr 06, 2020
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Apr 06, 2020
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Hardcover
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B07VKCDN1X
| 3.92
| 1,185
| Apr 21, 2020
| Apr 21, 2020
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it was amazing
| Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effect Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effectively once you’re aware of the pitfalls posed by the cognitive biases and illusions I’ve cited in this book.Bob Feller is reported to have said “Baseball is only a game, a game of inches, and lots of luck.” There is plenty of truth in that. But with the technological advances we have seen in the last decade, it may be that baseball has become a game of microns and milliseconds. The benefit of having so much more data available today than has ever been at the fingertips of field or general managers, not to mention bookmakers and bettors, (that means you, Pete) is that what’s been considered revealed wisdom in the national game can now be subjected to ever more penetrating analysis. What that analysis reveals is that many presumably valid ideas have now been shown to be demonstrably false. So why do so many baseball pros continue to rely on notions that are nonsense? Keith Law has some answers for that. [image] Keith Law - image from The Athletic In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues that what makes a so-called free economy productive is that people will act with a rational self-interest to pursue desired ends. Did Smith ever actually meet people? Sure, we have the capacity for rational thinking. And we even use it sometimes. But it is only one factor in how decisions are made. Decisions must, for good or ill (mostly ill), pass through a gauntlet of possible errors and biases. Law has pulled together a rich collection of poor excuses. We are all subject to biases, fallacies, aversions, and other non-rational forces of one sort and another, but ferreting out where irrational tilt lies is in the realm of psychology, and its dismal relation, economics. Law has been known to take on purveyors of bullshit before. You might enjoy his Twitter exchange with evolution-denier, Kurt Shilling, here. ESPN actually suspended his Twitter account for a while (without suspending Shilling’s) which suggests that they have a lot of evolving to do. He took considerable umbrage with purveyors of baseball-related bullshit in his first book, Smart Baseball. Tilting at the windmills of bovine droppings is clearly Law’s thing. And we are all the better-informed on account of that. In the highlighted paragraph at the top of this review, Law makes clear that while it is baseball that he is using for his examples, it is a wider reality that he hopes to influence. In doing so he espouses the wisdom to be found in a seminal work of behavioral science, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, which is referenced throughout. He bolsters his analysis with references to research done by other experts as well. There are thirteen chapters in the book, well fourteen if you add the Conclusion, each looking in some detail at particular types of bias, showing how that bias, or those biases impact decision-making, by players, umpires, field managers, team owners, and probably you and me. He offers not only backup on the theories behind each, but demonstrates the applicability of the theory with very real-world baseball examples. If you are averse to strong-opinions, Law may turn you off. He showed some rough tonal ledges in his first book, mostly absent here, but if you still believe that your best hitter should bat third, and that Joe Dimaggio deserved the MVP over Ted Williams in the year when the former hit in 56 consecutive games and the latter hit 406, you should be prepared to back those opinions up with facts, because Law can, and he makes perrsuasive arguments. One thing that Law does not do is dabble much in politics. It is clear from his introduction that it is his intent to show how biases enter into our judgments in all sorts of ways. Baseball is the lens through which he shows how diverse biases impact decisions in a bad way. But he wants to show how they impact all our decisions. Political creature that I am, a full Notre Dame (before the fire) of clanging bells was pushing my application of Law’s lessons to the political arena. Here are a couple of examples. Law looks at the success of manager Bob Brenly’s 2001 World Series vs the Yankees. The D’Backs won the series despite, not because of, Brenly’s decision-making. Law offers a considerable stack of judgmental errors Brenly made that should have resulted in his team being drubbed. Yet, the D’Backs won, and thus Brenly will evermore be known as a World-Series-winning manager. This is outcome bias. Results matter more than anything. But only if you are not interested in the future. Could a bad manager expect to have success going forward with the same set of instincts? Not bloody likely. Law quotes Thinking, Fast and Slow for this: We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.Fifty two Americans were taken hostage in Iran on November 4, 1979, after Iranian students took over the American embassy in Tehran. In April, 1980, President Carter ordered a rescue mission. The attempt failed, and Carter’s re-election prospects were irretrievably damaged as a result. There were plenty of other forces at play, including the GOP indulging in secret negotiations with Iran to encourage them to hang onto the captives until after the November 1980 elections, and the ABC show Nightline dedicating their nightly coverage to the “Hostage Crisis,” making sure to keep the issue at the top of everyone’s consciousness for the entirety of the election season. Whatever one may think of Jimmy Carter as president, it was a daring move to attempt a rescue. The failure was not his. It was in the implementation of Operation Eagle Claw. Yet, Carter took the blame for it, unfairly in my view. Results matter, but they are not all that matters. The unsuccessful resolution of the hostage crisis before the November 1980 elections doomed Carter, even though he made the best decision possible under impossible circumstance. He might have lost anyway, but the failure of the rescue mission made that loss a certainty. The illusory truth effect. Why do we cling to truths long after they’ve been disproven or lost their usefulness? Is it really just a matter of hearing something preached as true so frequently that our minds accept them not just as fact, but as the default perspective that must be actively dislodged by the jaws of life? Yes, as it turns out.In his examples, Law writes about batter protection in a lineup. (A batter will get a juicier selection of pitches to swing at if the batter following him is a more dangerous hitter.) Turns out there is no real statistical evidence to support the notion. Yet, through persistent repetition over time, by people who should know better, belief in lineup protection persists. Can any of you offer a real-world number for how many times you have heard Donald Trump speak the words “no collusion?” I doubt any of us who do not live in caves really can. And if you are an adherent to right-wing media, Fox, Rush, Sinclair, or the like, you are probably speaking it aloud in your sleep, to the alarm of your bed-partner. Despite a detailed commission report that offers fine detail on just how that collusion was carried out, there are still people who believe that Trump did not collude with Russia in his 2016 presidential campaign. There are probably even people who are not of the cultish right who harbor doubts about it. It is pretty clear that repeating something over and over and over and over and over…continued ad nauseum, has the same effect on reason that the Colorado River had on the landscape of the Grand Canyon. I could go on, but you get the idea. Law identifies a passel of these, including anchoring, availability, hindsight, optimism, order, outcome, recency, status quo and survivorship biases. He tosses in a handful of fallacies, some aversions, and a soupçon of other irrational tiltings. I do not really have any gripes with the book, but there was one instance in particular in which I thought Law tilted the wrong way. When a specific fact or example comes to mind more readily, we tend to overemphasize that fact or example—maybe we ascribe too much importance to it, or perhaps we extrapolate and assume that that example is representative of the whole. This phenomenon is called availability bias, and I think it’s one of the easiest biases to understand but one of the hardest to catch in yourself, because it’s not just natural, but easy. Your brain is just doing what you asked, right? You thought about some question, and your brain went right to the hard drive and pulled out something relevant. Your brain didn’t go to the archives, although, and it probably just gave you one thing when you actually needed the whole set.I believe Law dismisses a concern that should be obvious. For example, he regards the selection of the last place Cubs’ Andre Dawson for the 1987 MVP as a travesty, given that his numbers were bested by several players in the league. But that presumes that numbers are the only things worth considering in casting those ballots. Dawson, as Law notes, had taken on collusion by MLB ownership in their attempt to protect the notorious reserve clause. He offered the Cubs a contract with the salary left blank. He would play for any amount of money. It forced the Cubs’ owner’s hand, and helped advance the cause of possible free agency. His statistical value as a player may have been well below that of some other players, but his courage, and sheer value to the game was unparalleled. It was for this that he was likely rewarded by MVP voters. In this instance, Law contends that it was Dawson’s being in the news every day in coverage of the free agency issue that won him the award, the availability bias of frequent and recent repetition that moved voting Dawson’s way. But do not be put off by that. There is a vast amount to love in The Inside Game. It offers a way to explain not only why so much misunderstanding bedevils baseball, but how such misunderstandings permeate all human activity. It is a look not just inside how baseball decisions are made, but how perspectives and decisions are arrived at inside our own heads. 2020 was a lost year for baseball, entirely for the minors, and largely for the top tier. 2021 again offered a 162 game season. Given that hospitalizations for Covid in Spring 2021, despite increasing numbers of people being vaccinated, have been increasing, made that prospect less than certain. The first game of the season for my Mets, for example, did not go off as hoped because at least one Washington Nationals player had come down with Covid, and at least four others were contact-traced into quarantine. You may find yourself with a few baseball-watching hours freed up by such forms of misery. If so, you can sustain your connection to the national pastime by passing some productive time with Keith Law. It will help you prepare for what games are actually being played in MLB, given whatever plague is making the rounds when you get to it, and offer you the bonus of offering insightful information about the wider world, and how we frail humans function. Check this one out. It’s the right call. Review posted – March 27, 2020 Publication dates ----------April 21, 2020 - hardcover ----------April 6, 2021 - trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You should know that his personal site is for things unrelated to sports. He had a blog on ESPN, but one must sign in to get the full benefit, and he no longer work there. These days he is a sen ior baseball writer for The Athletic, also a pay site. You can find his podcast for them here. My review of the author’s prior book -----2017 - Smart Baseball Interview -----Hittin' Season - Episode #376 - with John Stolnis Thanks to GR friend (although, sadly, a Phillies fan) Regina Wilson for letting us know about this excellent interview Items of Interest -----Baseball Prospectus - Going Streaking by Russell Carleton -----Fangraphs -----Wiki on Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow ----- Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Nudge -----Wiki on Richard Thaler’s book Misbehaving -----Baseball’s reserve clause ----- Operation Eagle Claw ...more |
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Mar 21, 2020
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really liked it
| On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Cont On January 13, 2017, a brief article from Washoe’s [Washoe County, in Nevada] public health officials was published in the Centers for Disease Control’s Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, and it sent shockwaves around the world. It was the first report of its kind—never before had a US county public health official written about a complete failure of every single antibacterial drug that they had available to them.It was darkly serendipitous that I was reading this book in March, 2020, and that the book would find its way to bookstores in April, when, no doubt, we would still be facing considerable personal and global, medical and economic challenges from what must be deemed public enemy number one, COVID-19. If you will indulge me, I would like to talk a bit about the current [2020] crisis which, while very much related to the book under review, is only one element. I promise to get to the actual book review part before too long. The SARS epidemic began in 2002. According to the National Health Service in the UK “There’s currently no cure for SARS, but research to find a vaccine is ongoing.” Tick tock, guys, I mean eighteen years is not enough? It gives you some idea of the level of concern about COVID-19. Even the nomenclature can be a bit confusing. “CO” is for “corona,” the type. “VI” is for virus, duh-uh. “D” however, may not be obvious but will be after you read this. Disease. See? The “19” is not the 19th iteration of this malady, but represents the first year in which it was identified, or 2019. You will not find a COVID-18. The actual virus is called “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”, or SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. And Yes, it is very much related to the earlier SARS virus and disease. Two days before my wife was due to return to NYC where she worked several days a week, the first case was confirmed in Manhattan. She still went in. Work is work. In the absence of a corporate ok, most people were reluctant to just call out. How many other people were faced with the same challenge? Go in or stay home? How can one judge the risk if there is no good information yet on how vulnerable one might be to picking up the virus at, say, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, or at Grand Central Station or on the A train, or on the local bus? Maybe your Uber or taxi driver is a carrier and does not even know it. Paranoia can be understandable at such times. For myself, I do not need to interact much with the world, relatively. A good thing, given that I am in the age group most susceptible to the worst results from the virus. But the world does come to me. My wife’s trips to NYC stopped for now, corporate encouraging employees to work from home as much as possible, but we still have a truck-driver relation in the house on a daily basis, and we still have to shop, for food, meds, and other things. COVID-19 is a global peril because there are currently no drugs available that can dispatch it. [well, there weren't in 2020] Forget a vaccination that is probably well over a year away, if even then. The best one can hope is that, if you get it, you can endure the flu-like symptoms for the duration of the infection, and that your symptoms do not become severe. For the optimistic, The National Institutes of Health reports that they are testing a possible treatment. No date was offered on when the test period would end, or when a decision could be made as to the efficacy of the treatment, the drug Remdesivir, nor, if proven effective, how long it might be before production could be scaled up to provide the vast volumes of the drug that will no doubt be needed. It used to be that afflictions were named for the place where they were first discovered. MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, comes to mind. And it should be known that the Spanish flu actually originated in Kansas, but was first copped to in Spain. Locality use in nomenclature for diseases is now considered unacceptable, as stigmatizing. Of course, there are cynical folks on the right who are deliberately attempting to distract political attention from the colossal failure of the Trump administration in the face of this crisis by poking racist nerves and referring to COVID-19 as the Chinse flu, the Wuhan flu or the Wu-Flu. The hope is that it will prompt Dems to go after them for their racism, and then they could be talking about the attack by Dems and not the administration’s lies, failures, cover-ups, and cluelessness. This week, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. My wife did not travel to Manhattan, but worked the full week from home, and will (and did) until directed otherwise. But the reality of the threat continues to grow (the NBA just postponed the entire 2020 season), MLB has postponed all games, Spring training and regular season, a pointless ban on travel from most of Europe has been announced, and tests for COVID-19 remain in mortally short supply here in the USA. If you can’t test anyone, you can’t confirm an increase in the number of cases, or so I expect the thinking goes in some quarters. Thanks for indulging me, now on to the book. [image] Muhammad H. Zaman - image from NTNU Returning to the opening quote from the book, people and bacteria have been engaged in an arms race for a long time, or it might be better called an AMRs (Antimicrobial resistance) race, and it appears that the microbes are one up on us at present. This is a biography. One might think of it in terms that some of us of a certain age might associate with a TV show from the way-back, This Is Your Life. A celebrity guest would be introduced, then we watched her or him react to a procession of people from their life, usually teachers, old friends, mentors maybe, arresting officers, whatever. I suppose one might think of Biography of Resistance in a similar vein. We are told at the beginning that a malady has been found (see opening quote) that has proved resistant to all known antibiotics. The bug in question was a CRE (carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae). Many Entero bacteria are harmless, but this family member was Klebsiella pneumoniae, the culprit behind not only many a UTI, but life-threatening sepsis and pneumonia, as well. All known antibiotics (26 at the time) were tried. The patient died of sepsis. So how did this particular bacterium come to be, or, more importantly, how did this level of resistance come to be? We travel back to when we first found out about our previously unseen fellow Earthlings, and track the advance of our knowledge of them through the centuries. From seeing them at all to understanding that not all our fellow passengers were benign. The action picks up in the mid-late 19th century, as, now recognizing some true enemies, means are found to do battle with them. Then they develop longbows, and we develop armor-plated vehicles, and they develop rocket fired grenades and we develop aircraft and on and on it goes. This history is often fascinating. One of the things that many popular science books do is to use people as vessels with which to deliver historical and scientific information. (Maybe like inserting a curative virus inside a friendly-looking bacterium in order to slip past defenses of the malignant microbe?) We can more easily relate to other people than we might to raw descriptions of science. And if the scientists in question sometimes have oversized personalities, so much the better. It makes for better story-telling. Some of the names here will be familiar, particularly to any who work or dabble in the life sciences. Maimonides, for example, nailed a description of pneumonia symptoms in the 12th century. Robert Locke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, showed that there is an entire world of living things inside the smallest objects. Antonie van Leeuwenhook built a better Where there is discovery there is often ego, sometimes to the point of personal, professional, and decidedly dickish competitiveness. Some early work in the examination of pneumonia descended to this level, sadly. You will learn about Robert Koch, a German microbiologist who, in addition to doing breakthrough work on fighting the black death, ran an institute that produced world class international researchers as if he had found a magic way to clone genius. You will also learn of household-name science icons who were not above fudging data when necessary to prove a point. [image] Robert Koch was the Professor Xavier to a generation of microbiological superheroes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, training such household names as Kitisato (a household name in Japan), Julius Petri, yes, of that dish, and Paul Ehrlich, notable for his concerns about population growth, finding a cure for syphilis, and a for being the father of chemotherapy. - image from NobelPrize.org It is worth knowing how antibiotics actually work, what it is that they do, and how they do it. (Teachers and classmates report how the biographed bac snuck off the schoolgrounds and got into all sorts of trouble, while somehow maintaining top grades) Zaman offers a very readable description of ways in which antibiotics (ABs) go after bacteria and utterly fascinating material about the defenses, some of which are remarkably complex, that bacteria have developed (evolved) to fend off such attacks, including using antibiotic attackers as food. He also reports on different sorts of ABs that have been developed over time, things like bacteriophages, (bacteria eaters) aka phages, sulfa drugs, and a kind of fungus that disarms bacteria. One large surprise is that bacteria develop antibacterial defenses independent of the presence of humans. (Brothers and sisters appear on stage, telling about what a rotten sib the bacterium was) It would appear that we have joined a battle that has been raging for as long as bacteria have been on the planet. Another is the sources that are used when looking for new AB materials to bring to bear in the ongoing war. It was also heartening to learn of a particular confluence of disparate scientific disciplines joining forces to advance our knowledge, and hopefully enhance our armory. [image] Actually, resistance, despite some temporary setbacks, seems to be working out pretty well for pathogenic (hostile) microbes (Lifelong friends, business associates and rivals offer some final praise for the guest of honor) Bringing us up to the present, Zaman catches us up on the dangers we face in the globalization of infection, the misuse of antibiotics as a contributor to the growth of AB resistance, the latest insight on how resistance is replicated, and delves smartly into sociopolitical elements of international health care politics and economics. Some of this is unsurprising, as companies that make their money selling antibiotics lobby against any restrictions, and too many have reduced or eliminated investment in AB research and development, because such products are less likely to earn an optimal ROI than drugs intended for regular, ongoing use. He points out how important it is to involve people other than scientists in the drive to develop new defenses. Economists, politicians, social scientists, anthropologists, writers and more all need to play a part in helping us find ways to survive in what has become, and what we have helped make, a hostile environment. Mother’s milk for policy geeks. [image] Chart is from AMR review Gripes - I did not keep a running total, but the sheer number of named researchers did seem a bit encyclopedic at times, as if the author felt compelled to incorporate as many people as possible into his narrative. I expect, in reality, he was pulling hair out because of having to leave so many other scientists out of the narrative, but the number left in seemed a bit excessive. I doubt this can be defended as a gripe, more of a personal preference, really. But I find that science writing is hugely enhanced by the presence of a degree of levity. Mary Roach is the most stunning example of the application of (often jejune) humor to otherwise serious popular science narratives. You will be in no danger of having your latte shoot through your nose as you are ambushed by something totally hilarious in this one. Sip on in confidence. At the very least, The Biography of Resistance will give you some perspective, a more informed look at just how challenging it is for medical science to keep ahead of (or more accurately catch up to) the resistance that diverse, harmful bacteria keep coming up with to make us ill. Doctor Zaman covers a lot of territory in this very readable, relatively brief (263 pages) book. From the history of our learning what microbes are to showing how antibiotics attack bacteria, and how bacteria fight back, to showing the impact of antibiotics in the world, showing how their overuse has worsened an already challenging problem, pointing out what is currently being done, and offering a broad strategy for moving on, incorporating diverse disciplines. You will learn a lot, and I cannot imagine a timelier book as we try to make our way through what could well be called by future historians 2020: The Year of the Plague If nothing changes, and we continue on the path we’re now on, by 2050 the world will lose 10 million people a year, every year, to resistant infections. Review first posted – March 13, 2020 Publication date – April 21, 2020 =============================EXTRA STUFF - See below ...more |
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it was amazing
| With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, ever With Trump in the White House there would presumably be extensive digging into every deal he’d ever done, every partner he’d ever worked with, every loan he’d ever received—many of which involved Deutsche. And the facts that Trump’s election was under a cloud because of Russia’s efforts to sway the vote and that his leading lender had for years been engaged in money-laundering activity in Russia—well, it didn’t take a genius to realize that real or imagined dots would soon be connected linking Deutsche to Russia to Donald Trump. This was especially true since the bank a decade earlier had connected Trump with wealthy Russians as he prepared to build resorts in Hawaii and Mexico.We all know that those much anticipated revelations have had scant time in the sun, but we also know that Deutsche Bank (DB) is where a whole bunch of the bodies are buried. In looking at DB, Donald Trump makes up only a small part of the book, but he is the tale that wags the dog in this biography of a bank. Donald Trump is a deadbeat, a con man extraordinaire. After getting massive loans from a range of New York banks, and stiffing them, resulting in massive losses, he was essentially blacklisted in New York. No reputable bank would lend him anything. Yet, as he announced his candidacy for the presidency, there was one financial entity still willing to do deals with him. How did DB get to a point where they were the only bank in the world that would lend money to such a complete fiscal lowlife. How could any bank make loans of billions of dollars to him and his family? [image] David Enrich - image from AirMail.News Enrich introduces us early to a key figure in understanding DB’s secrets. Val Broeksmit was the ne’er do well stepson of Bill Broeksmit, a reasonably ethical guy who had been called on multiple times to step in at DB and make sure things were being done on the up and up. When they were not, he let upper management know. This does not mean that his advice was always heeded. But there came a time when regulators were closing in, and a part of DB where he had particular responsibility had been doing business in an unacceptable way. He had missed it. Years of working at this mad company had taken a toll. He had retired or tried to retire several times, but, like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, he finds it is not so easy to stay out. The years of major stress and this final failing, his internalization of the stresses of the company, became too much. Bill hanged himself. (although Val thinks he was killed) Val managed to get his hands on considerable quantities of stepdad’s communications. How he uses this trove, and how it is used by others, researchers, authors, and government officials, forms a tranche that permeates the modern story of the bank. As an example of how greed turns good people turn bad, though, it is never made clear that Broeksmit had ever really done anything illegal or clearly unethical. Maybe it is more that this criminal corporation had destroyed a guy who was basically decent, who had the temerity to ask how bank actions might affect their clients. [image] Bill Broeksmit - image from The New York Post Enrich gives us a look at the bank’s beginnings in the 19th century, its later alignment with Nazis, as it removed Jews from its board and staff, its financing of the construction of Aushwitz, and its survival, after the war. The USA wanted the bank liquidated, but the UK wanted it around to help in paying the UK the war debts Germany had agreed to. [image] Val Broeksmit - image from the NY Times DB settled in to being a conservative bank, serving businesses, and scrupulously looking after their clients’ interests. But a new element entered as derivatives began to grow from a conservative way to hedge one’s risks to a form of casino gambling. DB looked to expand from its European roots to a global presence. They brought in people, from the USA and elsewhere, who had the expertise to establish DB in these new markets. [image] Josef Ackermann - image from The Irish Times - DB CEO from 2002 to 2012 – he led the huge expansion of the corporation It was wildly successful, even if the paper DB held, now that it was gambling with its own as well its clients’ money, might be wildly overvalued. DB had made itself into the largest bank in the world. Part of the success was because the top bosses demanded insane levels of growth. At one point it was expected that profits should grow 25% a year. In no sane world was this possible. But there were, however, insane ways to achieve the goal. Do business with dodgy characters with whom no one else wanted to do business, and charge them hefty fees for the privilege. People like Russian oligarchs, middle eastern royal families, and kleptocrats, were eager for ways to transform their local currencies into dollars or euros, and DB was more than happy to help. They were also willing to match eastern dirty laundry with western spin cycles, and thus were able to connect Russian officials busy looting their nation’s resources with, say, real estate developers in need of large cash infusions to pursue expensive projects, for a piece of the action. Legality was an unfortunate victim to such transactions. International sanctions were ignored. Adherence to fiduciary norms took a hit. The result was that DB eventually became known for the stain of its dishonesty with its own customers, and willingness to cut legal corners to sustain an unnatural level of growth. Neither did the Mad Max atmosphere at the bank do much for the people working there, except, of course, for those directing the crimes, who made off with staggering sums. Enrich tells the DB story by focusing on a series of individuals at the upper levels of management, offering not only a look at where they came from and what they did in their executive positions, but a take on their personalities, what made them tick, even, for some, their family lives. This approach is a common, but effective one, that succeeds in making the DB story not one of a glass-encased corporate entity (or, a person, according to Mitt Romney) but a human story, with some decent people, some bad guys, and some really, really bad guys. [image] The DB towers in Frankfurt – image by Krisztian Bocs for Bloomberg There are some fun bits in here that are likely to surprise you, like how Val and his trove of dad’s intel got connected with Adam Schiff by way of Moby. Mostly, though, Val’s doings seem sad rather than enlightening, but do offer a bit of a look at how difficult it can be, sometimes, for journalists and investigators to secure much-needed information, when the source is less than a standup sort. [image] Anshu Jain - Co-CEO of DB from 2011 to 2015 – he left as a result of the the Libor Rate-fixing Scandal - image from FirstPost.com By the end you will see how it came about that DJT had found a financial home with DB, and you will know what it took for a conservative institution to have totally lost its mind and evolved into a grand scale criminal enterprise. And you will be left wondering just how long it will take for the wheels of justice to grind their way to delivering actual justice to so many who flaunt the laws to the detriment of the rest of us. In the final months of the Obama administration, all signs had pointed to charges soon being filed against bank employees and probably the bank itself. At the very least, a multibillion-dollar financial penalty looked all but certain.Something curious, however, had happened as soon as Trump took the oath of office. The investigation had gone silent. Week after week, Deutsch’s lawyers and executives wondered when they would get an update. At first, they worried that the delay spelled trouble. Perhaps, after campaigning as a populist, after vowing that he was “not going to let Wall Street get away with murder,” Trump planned an aggressive crackdown on banking malfeasance. Perhaps, after having his election victory tarnished by Russian interference, Trump would try to dispel those suspicions with a high-profile assault on Russian money laundering. But as the months passed, and nothing happened, executives’ fears faded. One source of relief was the realization that two of the Justice Department’s most powerful prosecutors, Geoffrey Berman and Robert Khuzami, both had previously represented Deutsche…Bank executives soon concluded that Russia was off-limits, too hot to handle, for the Trump administration. So, it seemed, was Deutsche. Review first posted – February 28, 2020 Publication dates ----------February 18, 2020 - hardcover ----------December 16, 2020 - trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s GR, Twitter, Instagram and FB pages Interviews ----- Expected case against Deutsche Bank disappeared in Trump transition -----Rachel Maddow - Transcript of the entire show -----NPR - 'Dark Towers' Exposes Chaos And Corruption At The Bank That Holds Trump's Secrets - by Dale Davies Items of Interest -----Why are so many bankers committing suicide? -----NY Times – by Enrich - Me and My Whistle-Blower -----The Libor Scandal ...more |
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Feb 24, 2020
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0593137582
| 9780593137581
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| 4.15
| 1,484
| Jan 14, 2020
| Jan 14, 2020
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it was amazing
| Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long Why this Book? To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that I acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” [image] Rick Wilson - image from Fast Company – photo credit - Celine Grouard Rick Wilson is the Don Rickles (Mister Warmth) of political punditry. They are both laugh out loud funny and extremely caustic. Rickles, who died in 2017 after a very long and successful career as a stand-up comedian and actor made his living by making people laugh while saying terrible things about them, to their faces. Wilson could probably have a career in comedy if he wanted one, but he has other ambitions. Thankfully they are not the same as his old ambitions. Wilson has made a career of advising Republican candidates for office, and working as an opinion writer. He advised Rudy Giuliani while he was mayor of New York City, and in his campaign against Hillary Clinton for Senate. He was a field director in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. In 2002 he was a media advisor to Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss. In that campaign, he attacked Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs to a grenade in Viet Nam, as soft on defense, dishonestly linking him with Osama bin Laden. He created an ad in the 2008 presidential race that attacked Obama for his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In 2014 he crafted a GOP ad that used hatred of Obama as motivation for voting against other Dems. In 2016 he worked for Carlos Cantera’s unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in Washington, and also worked for Marco Rubio in his successful Senatorial bid. His efforts have been characterized by negativity, delight in going after opponents with whatever weapons work, and a feckless disregard for the truth. In 2016, however, this paragon of virtue was among many Republicans whose tolerance for awfulness was pretty high, who found Donald Trump an unacceptable candidate, and became what we now refer to as a never-Trumper. Yeah, unfortunately, there was always a dynamic pressure inside the party. The fiscal people and the individual liberty people would keep the social conservatives from getting too out of control. The social conservatives would keep the fiscal people from getting too out of control. The foreign policy people, this tripartite internal, the three-legged stool they used to call it. Well with Trump, that all fell apart. It's all gone. It's all id. It's everything that's in their heads. They're told, "You can have whatever you want, we're going to burn it all down." And that's what they're doing. - from the Salon interviewThere are many who fit that description, Republicans who will never support Trump. Of course, these days, while some such folks remain Republican, a growing number have abandoned the GOP, as the party they loved has become the party of Trump, a cult-like organization that bears little resemblance, in their minds, to its predecessor. (See the link in EXTRA STUFF to The Lincoln Project, an organization of erstwhile Republican Never-Trumpers that seeks to help end the Reign of the Suntan King) These folks still support a host of policy positions that I, and most of my fellow and sister Democrats, find unacceptable, appalling, and often inhuman. Nevertheless, while we may flip birds and scream epithets at each other across a river, we share a common cause in not allowing that river to rise up like the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and destroy us all. Donald Jessica Trump (name variant courtesy of Randy Rainbow) is that flood and we need to make common cause with some of those awful people on the other side to prevent an existential catastrophe. While merrily hurling insults at Democrats, Rick Wilson, former GOP mischief-maker, current Never-Trumper, and really funny guy, now offers his acquired wisdom to Democrats. I recognize that the next two paragraphs (about 450 words) constitute an aside, so am tucking them under a spoiler tag to spare those who object to my leisurely pace. There is nothing remotely spoilerish here.(view spoiler)[I read this book in an unusual manner. Typically, I take in my primary read each week, whether paper or e-book, at my iMac, entering notes as I go along. My secondary book I read at bedtime, upstairs, anywhere from ten to twenty pages a night, most of the time, entering notes into a laptop or paper notebook. I had Wilson’s book on my radar, and on the family stack, but there was no certainty I would review it at all. It so happened that a long-awaited front door was being delivered on February 10. Had to get up early in order to take up guard duty. The work entailed required that the existing front door be removed, and would mean a serious security risk for the several hours the installers needed to complete the installation. Not a big deal for most of us. A bit chilly, perhaps, but putting on a few layers takes care of that. No concerns about home invasions. But we had considerable concern about one or more of our four-legged family members giving in to their native curiosity and making a dash for the exit. While it is possible to wrangle most herd members into rooms with doors that close with cat treats, there are always a few who are not so easily suckered. Thus, guard duty. I firmly planted my bottom on a chair near the front door, trying my best not to pay any attention to the oral garbage being spewed by the workmen’s radio. It was tuned to Rush Limbaugh’s show, and others of that ilk. The work took about six hours. Instead, I did my best to bury my consciousness in Wilson’s book. It was not hard. Wilson may still give off the brimstone aroma of a Republican political operative, but he is LOL funny. As much as he may insult members of my Democratic tribe, justifiably, regarding our campaigning skills, he saves most of his ordnance for Trump and his minions. Couldn’t help myself. Every now and again, I would begin laughing out loud, literally. My wife, working in the living room at the time, would pipe up “Rick?” To which I would respond, “Yep.” And then read her the passage of the moment. No note taking, digital or pen and notebook. I was just reading this to read it. It would be one of about ten to fifteen books I read each year with no intention of writing a review. But that changed. I managed to read all but one chapter during my protracted sit-down. Finished the final bit the next day. Knew I had to let folks know about this one. Now, counting heads…98, 99, 100, 101. Yep, they’re all accounted for. (hide spoiler)] The core can be distilled down to a few nuggets. Donald Trump is a menace to the nation we love, and we need to work together to remove him from the White House. Wilson can help, and he knows what he is talking about. The only real issue in the 2020 presidential race is Donald Trump, keep him or dump him. Those who are in his camp are not worth your time and energy. Ditto for those who are firmly against him. It boils down to fifteen states where the outcome is not already assured. Focus almost all your campaigning energy there. Wilson goes into detail about the best ways to attack Trump, both in the content of one’s media approach and in the need to tailor that approach to each locale. There is a lot to learn here about the details of the campaigning craft. Of particular interest was a breakdown of voters into “hidden tribes within the electorate.” Identifying where people fall in this sorting helps define how candidates might try to reach them. Q - If you were advising on the economy to these Democrats, what would you recommend?He talks about the horrific downside of a second Trump term, including the grooming of Ivanka and Don Jr to take over in 2024, the expansive corruption of all that is not already corrupt, the further degradation of the planet, and our remaining civil liberties, the jailing of his opponents, and more, none of it pretty. Wilson offers a list of Trumpian issues to focus on, depending on the location, corruption, misogyny and sexual aggression, paying off porn stars, kids in cages, alienating our allies while cozying up to authoritarians, and so much more. Hammer his ego, his declining mental capacity, weight, tiny hands, his actual net worth, his enslavement by Putin. And now his ongoing corruption of the Justice Department. Rick's theory is not (yet) endorsed by any Gallup poll. But it makes sense. So how would Rick hit Trump? "I'd hit him on his mental instability, because he thinks he's smart and sane and he's not. He thinks he's a remarkable communicator ... he's not, he's a 70-year-old asshole from Queens." Then Rick would go after his "reputation for wealth, which is unfounded in large measure, and that's a soft spot for him ..." A billionaire client of Rick's once said: "I'm a billionaire. Trump is a clown living on credit." So having real billionaires like Mark Cuban attack Trump in an ad would be an effective tactic. - from Cracked interviewWilson also offers advice that is fairly useless, urging Dems to start, before they can really turn their attention and their remaining funds to, going after the cheating Cheeto President. Not everyone is Michael Bloomburg, with, essentially, endless funds. (Mayor Mike entered the race too late to be considered in the book.) He urges Dems to minimize talk of policy. Again, this ignores the primary season. An ability to kick Trump in the nuts as needed is a talent to be admired, but there still needs to be some policy vetting by Democratic voters. I expect the central party is hurting for funds, (pure guesswork on my part) as most available contributions are probably going to candidates, so even the Democratic Party itself likely lacks the means to implement an attack-early-and-often strategy as soon as would be desirable. The book is divided into Six Parts. Within each part the chapters are introduced by what are frequently LOL short comedic pieces. Part One chapter intros are Tweets From Donald Trump’s Second Term, Part Two chapter intros are from White House Diaries: Melania Trump, and so on. A sample from Part One: @realDonaldTrump: some lying liberal media who are DFAILING BADLY and will soon be bankrupt like the Bezos Washington Post are reporting that Stephen Miller was arrested for making a suit from a woman’s skin and eating her. FAKE NEWS. He did NOT EAT HER! Stephen is doing a GRATE job!There are plenty of well-deserved shots taken at Democratic campaigners and some less-deserved snark directed at Democratic values and programs, but that is part of the package. Overall, this is one of those books that anyone involved in politics in any way should read. It is funny, profane, and wildly insightful and useful. Every Democratic political operative should have a copy and I expect to see those copies heavily dog-eared. For the rest of us, if you enjoy a good dose of laughter and cynicism with your political writings, this is the book for you. Wilson may be the demon spawn of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, but he is one funny, smart sulfur-scented writer. His book not only explains what has gone wrong before but offers the tools to see why the political ads that bombard your TV and other screens are working or failing. We cannot afford four more years of the Turd Reich. Read this book! He will always be with us, to the end of our days, either as a warning or as a boot stomping on our faces, forever. Review first posted – February 21, 2020 Publication date – January 14, 2020 ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below, in comment #1 [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 10, 2020
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1250621569
| 9781250621566
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it was amazing
| What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t ev What do you do when you’re a scared-shitless kid that’s been faking it for so long? You bury it. You polish your smile and study until you can’t even focus your eyes. You buy yourself a big red sweater with an S across the chest, just like the superchild you once were. You try to prove them all wrong. You attempt to outrun it. But then you get injured and your mom goes insane and a kind man in a blue shirt with a trim black beard uses the words. Emotional abuse. Crossing physical boundaries, Trauma. Neglect. I feel like a blank space covered in skin.Who is that masked man? If all of your life you’ve worn a mask, what do you see in the mirror? A reflection of someone you aren’t. How can you know who you really are, or who you might become, if you see your world through cut-out holes? And the world never gets to see you, never gets to relate to you, the real you, behind your facade. Kinda tough to live your best life that way. Kinda tough to live a real life that way. And how did that mask get there in the first place? And how did it impact the nuts and bolts of your life? And is there any hope you can tear it off without losing the you beneath, pull it off slowly, maybe un-sew it from your face, a stitch at a time? [image] Mikel Jollett - image from his Twitter Who is that masked man, the kid from the cult, the pre-teen looking for thrills, the teenager who nearly killed himself, the long-distance-runner, the Stanford student, the substance abuser, the serial spoiler of relationships, the music-world journalist, the successful rock musician, the wonderful writer? Or are they all just different masks? [image] Synenon leader Charles Dederich - Image from San Diego State University The impetus to write the book was a recent one. Jollett had been writing and performing music with his band, Airborne Toxic Event, since 2005, a step sideways from his intention to pursue a writing career, and a closely linked redirection from his work as a music journalist. Then, in 2015, his father died, and Jollett says he was overwhelmed with grief and confusion. “I wondered why it hit me so hard, so I went back into my past—that day my mom took us out of the cult. I went in to lockdown and started to write.” He stayed with it for three years. - from the PW interviewThere was a lot to write about. This coming of age story begins when he was five. Jollett had the bad luck to be born into a bad situation. His parents were members of Synenon, a place that came to public prominence in the 1960s in California, a goto drug rehab community for a while. People charged with substance-related crimes were often sent there by California courts. It probably did some good in the beginning, but as the leader of Synenon, Chuck Dederich, became more and more unhinged and power mad, his not totally crazy community became a totally crazy cult. Not the best start for a new life. One of the rules in Synenon was that children were to be raised communally. So, even though mom and/or dad might be around, they were not the ones providing care. Have a nice life. “It was an orphanage!” Grandma screams. “That’s what you call a place where strangers raise your kids!” Grandma says that mom doesn’t even know who put us to bed or who woke us up or who taught us to read. She says we were sitting ducks. (We did play Duck Duck Goose a lot.) “You made them orphans, Gerry!” Grandma will point at us from her chair as we pretend not to listen.We follow Mik’s journey from his earliest memories of Synenon, raised by people other than his parents until Mom flees with him and his older brother in the dark of night. Most orphanages do not send goons to track down people, including children, who leave. Even out of the Synenon cult, Mik, his brother, Tony, and his mom, Gerry, were not safe. Mik gets to see a fellow “splittee” get beaten nearly to death by Synenon enforcers outside his new home. [image] Facing your dark side - image from Narcissism and emotional abuse.co.uk If this decidedly unstable beginning was not enough of a challenge, his mother was not the best of all possible parents. Is that a mom? Someone who you can’t ever remember not loving you? I know Mom doesn’t think that’s what it is but I do…She tells me I’m her son and she wanted kids so she wouldn’t be alone anymore and now she has us and it is a son’s job to take care of his mother.Gerry was just a weeeee bit narcissistic, to her children’s decided disadvantage. It would take Mik years to learn that the usual arrangement was that parents take care of children. [image] Image from collectiveevolution.com Jollett takes us through many stages of his life, successfully modulating the narrative to fit the age he is portraying in each. As he grows, his awareness increases and his interests broaden. It makes him, appropriately, an unreliable narrator as young Mik does not yet have the tools to see past the misinformation he is being given. It took my brother and I a long long time to piece together the reality that a functional adult might have about the situation, that we’d escaped a cult that had once done good things for addicts (including our father), that our mother was severely depressed, and that these experiences were very unique in some ways and quite common in others. So I wrote the book from that perspective, at least at the beginning: that of a child trying to piece together the reality of the changing world around him; because that’s how I experienced it. There were mysteries. What is a restaurant? (We’d never been in one). What is a car? A city? And, most devastatingly, what is a family? Because we simply didn’t know. - from the Celadon interviewBeing born into a cult and having a depressed, toxically narcissistic mother were two strikes already, but then pop, and other paternal family members had spent considerable time behind bars, and in both his paternal and his maternal trees there was a history of substance abuse, of one sort or many. You’d think Mik was destined to wind up an alcoholic and/or a drug addict and in jail. Is genetics destiny? This is a core battle he faced in his life. Another was to come to terms with how his strange upbringing affected how he related to other human beings, particularly to women. He talks a lot about how he presented a façade to the world, while keeping his truest self well back, if he even knew his true self at all. [image] Robert Smith mask - Image from funkyBunky.co Jollett endured years of poverty, and emotional abuse. He found outlets in criminal acts and substance abuse. But he also found other ways to fill his needs and channel his creativity. A close friend introduced him to the music that would push him in a new constructive direction. I go to a place in my head where I can be alone. Listening to Robert Smith sing his happy songs about how sad he feels is like he’s there too, like he has his Secret Place in his head where he goes and since he wrote a song about it, he’s right there in my headphones, so we’re in this Secret Place together. Me and Robert. It’s a place where we are allowed to be sad, instead of feeling like freaks of nature, us weirdos and orphans.A major change in Mik’s life is when he begins spending time with his father, Jimmy, and his father’s significant other, in Los Angeles, first summers, then, at age 11, moving there more permanently, Gerry having moved to Oregon with the boys when they were fleeing Synenon. It is a whole new world for him there, not just offering different ways to get into trouble, but the opportunity to get to know Jimmy and his father’s family, something that was not really possible in his earliest years, particularly as his mother had portrayed Jimmy negatively. I’d been told so many terrible things about him at a very young age. He was a heroin addict, an ex-con who’d done years in prison. He “left my mother for a tramp.” That was a common refrain. But none of it turned out to matter. He was clean by the time I was born and all I ever knew once I got to spend time with him, was this guy who would do anything for me. He was affectionate. He took us everywhere. He cared so deeply about our basic happiness. He had a great laugh and a quiet wisdom about him. He never cared what I became in life. He wanted me to be honest, to be interesting (or simply funny), and to be around. - from the Celadon interviewThe emotional core of the book is connections Jollett has, for good or ill, with the people in his life, friends, and particularly family. Jimmy was fond of betting on the ponies. He took Mik with him once he started visiting LA. Hollywood Park is the track they attended. It is where Mik has meaningful heart-to-hearts with his father. It is a place that lives in his imagination as well, a place where he can connect with his family across time. Will Mik grow up to be a ”Jollett Man,” a bad-ass tough guy who leans hard toward wildness, or something other? There are certainly strains in him that offer other possibilities. His athleticism, intellectual curiosity, academic licks, creativity, musical talent, and stick-to-itive-ness offer hope for a future different from his father’s. [image] Image from The Smiths and Morrissey FB pages As an adult, Mik finds a career in music, and gains insights into the musical creative process from some household names. He gains as well insights into his emotional state that help him understand the life he has been living. But the real core is how he got to that place to begin with. [image] Image from Invaluabl.com Jollett employs literary tools to great effect. For example, as an eight-year-old in Oregon, his family raised and slaughtered rabbits for food. In addition to this being a sign of the family’s poverty, it is clear that young Mik senses that he, too, is being raised in an emotional cage to provide sustenance of another sort. His writing is smooth and often moving. There are sum-up portions at the end of chapters that pull together what that chapter has been about. These bits tend toward the self-analytical, and are often poetic. …music makes me feel like I belong somewhere, that this person I don’t know, the one who swims beneath his life in a dark, chaotic, unknowable place, this one has a voice too.Mikel Jollett has written a remarkable memoir, offering not just a look at his dramatic and event-filled personal journey, but a peek out from the masks he wore to the times he lived through. While his actions and experiences covered a considerable swath, there is always, throughout his moving tale, a connection to family, to his mother, father, brother, various step-parents, his extended family, and closest friends. The power of these connections caused him considerable difficulty, but also made it possible for him to weather some major life storms. The odds are you will be moved by Jollett’s celebration of real human bonding, cringe at some of the challenges he had to endure, mumble an “oh, no,” or worse, as you see the missteps along his path, cheer for the triumphs when they come, and luxuriate in the beauty of his writing. Whatever else you may get from the book, it is clear that Mikel Jollett is unmasked as an outstanding writer. Hollywood Park is a sure winner of a read. Bet on it. One sentence [in The Scarlet Letter] stood out to me as I read on the edge of my bed. I marked the page: “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” It made me think of the Secret Place, the place I hide with Robert Smith. I know this face. I’ve learned not to tell anyone at school about Synanon or Dad in prison or…Mom in the bed staring up at the ceiling. It’s a mask, this face you create for others, one you hide behind as you laugh at jokes you don’t understand and skip uncomfortable details, entire years of your life, as if they simply didn’t happen. [image] Jollett (l.), with dad Jimmy and brother Tony -image from Publishers Weekly Review first posted – May 15, 2020 Publication dates ----------May 5, 2020 - hardcover ----------March 22, 2022 - trade paperback I received an ARE of this book from Celadon in return for an honest review. But, do they really know who they gave this book to? I could be anyone, pretending to be anyone. Thanks to MC, too. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been, or soon will be, cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
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Apr 25, 2020
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Feb 07, 2020
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Hardcover
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liked it
| He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding a He was like a 12-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport. This was not how it was supposed to be.---------------------------------------- In the history of American democracy, we have had undisciplined presidents. We have had incurious presidents. We have had inexperienced presidents. We have had amoral presidents. Rarely if ever before have we had them all at once.Given the spate of news reports and exposés in newspapers, magazines, TV, and in social media, it is impossible to keep up, as the outrages revealed last week are topped by the revelations brought forth this week, which will, of course, be topped by the revelations coming out next week in the book by whichever former Administration official or government whistle blower is next up. What makes any of them any different from any other? We know that Trump lies incessantly, so it is no shock to anyone with a functional brain when yet another lie is shown to be just that. What makes this book different (and, having read only a few of these things, I may be omitting similarities to books I have not taken in) is the view, fueled by observation, of just how bad things actually are. In September, 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed by the author (I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration), which caused a stir. The notions expressed there were developed into a book, A Warning, which was published in November 2019. The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder; This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gun-point, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.The author, who purports to be a “Senior Trump Administration Official,” divides the book between references to classical sociopolitical looks at leadership, and his-or-her first-hand observations (and second-hand reports) of Trump’s behavior, with a bit of analysis of the groups and competing interests within the Administration. Anonymous looks at what the ancient Greeks considered the ideal traits of a leader, using Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) as the measure. Point by point, the author contrasts the qualities thought desirable in a leader to the traits of Donald J. Trump. Things like Wisdom, Sense of Justice, Courage, and Temperance. It will come as no surprise that Trump presents the exact opposite traits from what one would want. Duh-uh. But it is nice to see it spelled out in reference to a classic perspective. This is mostly a been-there, done-that listing of the awfulness of Trump, delineated by type and sub-type of awfulness. Yawn. In a more alarming reference, Anonymous looks at Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a right-wing screed which sees in most state intervention in an otherwise unfettered (feral?) economy enslavement by the state. It is much loved by right-wing grad students, the same folks who read Ayn Rand with one hand. But there are some pretty good passages on totalitarianism, which is far likelier from the right than from the left, particularly in the USA. A quote from Hayek and some summaries of Hayek’s points sound just about right re what an aspiring autocrat needs: “He must gain the support of the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own, but are ready to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”Of course, Hayek goes too far, an autocrat needs a group with questionable morals, which will also tend to be undereducatedSorry, this is pure class bias, presuming as it does that the well-educated, who tend to be wealthier, are of a higher moral character than the poorer, less-well-educated rabble. Are the Kochs well educated? The Republicans in the Senate? The thieves on Wall Street? The CEOs of oil and gas transnationals? If anything, the middle, working and poor classes might be said to be of superior moral quality to those in power, who often seem selected by their degree of disregard for everyone else. The primary benefit to reading A Warning is to get a “you-are-there” sense of just how much of an idiot Trump truly is. A man of unparalleled venality, inflated self-regard, uninterested in learning, believer that all knowledge is to be found inside his tiny brain, a thief, liar, life-long criminal, and legend in his own mind, convinced from birth that rules do not apply to him, and now empowered to surround himself with a rotating cast of sycophants who serve to reflect back to him his vastly inflated sense of his own infallibility. Quoting the Boss, Badlands, Poor man want to be rich. Rich man want to be king. And a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything. Continuing on, King wants to be god. It worked for the Roman emperors. It is not at all shocking that Trump is encouraging the lunatics who proclaim him the second coming. Without, of course, all that messiness on Calvary. Even for those of us who tend to regard him as the epitome of the inherent evil of entitlement-plus-money, it becomes quite clear that those in the asylum with him have a much darker view of his mental competence than the general public. The secondary benefit is to get some detail on how the Madness (or is it criminality?) of King Donald manifests. We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he begins scanning the room for note takers. “What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting…His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience.If you wonder why the man who criticized Obama for playing too much golf spends such an incredible amount of time away from the West Wing, one reason (not to minimize Trump’s aversion to actual work) is that his staff schedules him for as much time as possible out of town to reduce the likelihood of major screw-ups. It is not news that the man made famous for the line “You’re Fired,” on TV is too cowardly to fire anyone in person, preferring to do the job by tweet or by having another underling do the deed. What Anonymous calls The Steady State is comprised of like-minded individuals, die-hard Republicans, who favor GOP policies, but are concerned about the behavior of the president. They do what they can to siderail, dissuade, or ignore presidential wishes that fall afoul of the law, common sense, or human decency (in that order). However, even Anonymous admits that the Resistance in the White House has seen its numbers drop and its hopes fade. Not sure if that means Anonymous is now a lone voice or not, but if resistance to foolishness is a lost cause, what is Anonymous still doing there? Anonymous presents clear Republican ignorance, or dishonesty, certainly bias on many occasions. For example, Anon lauds the wisdom of the founders in choosing a representative rather than a direct democracy, as the mob is too subject to flattery and demagoguery, and will overwhelm more sedate reason. While there certainly is some basis for this concern, this manages to put the responsibility for such danger entirely on the people, ignoring that it is business, the business of Fox News and lobbyists, for example, that create these groundswells, and which the Republican Party has been more than happy to exploit to get its way. He lauds Trump for installing a Stronger conservative bench. The installing of right-wing judges on SCOTUS would have happened under any Republican president, and was made possible in part by Mitch McConnell refusing to bring Obama’s nominee to the Senate, essentially stealing a seat. Great guys, those Republicans. He also lauds the burdensome red tape that has been slashed on his watch, closely matched by the resulting degradation of our environment, which is somehow not mentioned. Add to it the changes to our insane tax code. Oh, you mean adding over a trillion dollars to the federal debt by giving money away to the wealthy and to corporations? Now, that’s crazy. And on it goes. Excerpts from A Warning were released in The Washington Post a few weeks before publication. One highlight was of a possible midnight self-massacre to let the public know of the chaos that reigned in the White House. But they didn’t, did they? Which is a lot like watching Jeff Flake or Susan Collins twisting themselves into pretzels before the cameras to avoid admitting they would toe the party line, only to apply all ten toes to that line when it came time to vote. So, aside from dividing Trump’s lackeys into Sycophants (shirts) and Silent Abettors (skins), how much do we actually learn here? Primarily the value of A Warning is in showing us the depth of the morass, just how venal, just how criminally inclined, just how ignorant, just how egotistical, just how intolerant, just how cruel and mean-spirited, just how resistant to knowledge, and just what an absolutely awful human being Trump is. And to portray a White House staff that has to wonder, every bloody day when they wake up, what has he done now? Yeah, and? A Warning does not really tell us much that we did not already know. It is entertaining (in a dark way) at times, but sometimes also feels loaded with filler. It is not a bad book, but in a world lousy with better books about Trump and books about the issues which Trump has impacted like cruise passengers fed bad sushi, I would look elsewhere. You have been warned. We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will abuse any power he is given. Review first posted – January 10, 2020 Publication date – November 19, 2019 . PS - If we still have a republic after Donald Trump walks out of the Oval, or more likely, is carried out in a body bag after a third or fourth secret heart attack, or, my personal favorite, is frog-marched out of the office in the custody of armed law-enforcement or military officers, we will owe him a debt of gratitude. Donald Trump has given the United States an invaluable lesson. By his total disregard for social, legal, and political norms, by his willingness to thumb his nose at the rule of law, he has shown us where our fault lines lie. He has shown us what can happen if we put a malignant narcissist or even a sociopath into the presidency. And we should use this lesson to construct a stronger union, one that does not rely on the good will of decent people to lead our nation, but enshrines into law mechanisms that assure that another Donald Trump can never again happen here. (As of November 2022, we are still waiting) [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Items of Interest -----De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero – on Gutenberg -----Springsteen - Badlands ----NY Times – September, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration ----The Road to Serfdom - by Friedrich Hayek -----The Lincoln Project - Bloodlines ----Other Trumpian books worth a look -----Tyrannical Minds by Dean Haycock -----The Plot to Destroy Democ racy by Malcolm Nance -----Fear by Bob Woodward -----Collusion- by Luke Harding -----Trumpocracy by David Frum -----Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff -----Unbelievable by Katy Tur -----The Case for Impeachment by Allan J. Lichtman -----Truth in Our Times by David E. McCraw ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 29, 2019
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Kindle Edition
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0525575472
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| 15,082
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| Oct 01, 2019
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it was amazing
| I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through.Rachel Maddow is the top news personality at MSNBC, host of The Rachel Maddow Show for the last eleven years. One of the smartest people to be found on your television, or screen of choice, she relies on research, facts, and informed guests to present her viewers with as high-end an hour of political news coverage as you can find anywhere, all while being upbeat, friendly, funny, and warm. Watching her show it might not be totally obvious, because she is so nice, but she is a first class hard-edged, incisive intellectual, a Rhodes scholar with a triumph of a book already to her credit, Drift, on our national tendency to war. One other gift Maddow possesses is a talent for story-telling. Watch her A-block (the opening 20 minute segment of her show) some night, any night, for a taste. In Blowout, Maddow looks at the centrality of oil (by which we mean oil and gas) to our history and to the events of the world today. Rachel Maddow didn't set out to write a book. But a nagging question led her there: Why did Russia interfere in America's 2016 presidential election, and why attack the United States in such a cunning way? Although the MSNBC host regularly devotes ample airtime to the topic of Russia on The Rachel Maddow Show, her digging led her to a thesis she thought was too long for TV.[image] Rachel - image from Hooch.net From her depiction of Vladimir Putin’s visit to NYC to celebrate the opening of the first Lukoil gas station in the USA, to the story of alarming means being used in an early attempt at fracking, from a look at how third-world dictators live large on oil revenues, while their people suffer, from the history of oil to the history of Putin, from the big personalities to the local damage, she takes you right there and walks you through the events like a docent leading a group through the Met, a very slippery, oily Met. Watch that glimmery puddle! On our right is a family tree that echoes the shape of a gusher, noting the beginning of oil drilling in 1859, see where Rockefeller and Standard Oil gets into the game, and everything spreads out from there until the canvas is almost entirely covered in iridescent black goo. [image] John D. Rockefeller - image from Curious Historian This one over here is quite surprising. There is a story to the mushrooms. You think fracking for natural gas is a nasty, brute force extraction method, generating vast collateral damage? You would be right of course, but in the 60s and 70s an even scarier method of loosening up the gas trapped in underground shale and sandstone was tested, three times, Nukes! Yes, that’s right. As a part of Project Plowshare, three Hiroshima-level nuclear bombs were detonated in the continental USA. Thankfully, and unsurprisingly, the resulting gas carried a level of radioactivity that was considered unmarketable, so the project was abandoned. Guess it had a very short half-life. Moving on, look over here. We have an excellent painting that shows how the oil/gas companies control academic research as well as government regulatory agencies. Notice how the energy company board overlaps the board of the local university, the one sponsoring the researcher who is looking into the possible causes for the steroidal increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma, an increase that occurred only after the introduction of fracking technology. You might recognize the large claw-like form in the painting, and the academic in that claw being squeezed. Definitely not OK. On your left you will see a more modern image, a dynamic sculpture, showing the recent story of fracking, very angular, as the straight vertical lines veer suddenly horizontal, but are accompanied by vast volumes of a goo called slickwater being forced into the ground. If you look back up to the top, you will see a geyser of very crude crude being forced up out of the ground. The artist has included, as part of the exhibition, a special platform around the work. Go ahead, step up. That bouncing and rumbling you feel beneath you is meant to mimic the actual experience of residents in heavily fracked locations. [image] Putin with his parents in 1985, before being sent to Germany as a KGB officer - image from wikimedia These lovely gilded tryptichs up ahead tell the story of Vladimir Putin, his rise from KGB operative in Germany to possible anti-Christ. Each panel shows a step along his path, growing from unknown KGB agent to mayor of St Petersburg, to the accumulation of a group of loyalists called the siloviki (which would be a great brand name for one of the few products Russia still produces, vodka), to aligning with, then back-stabbing Boris Yeltsin, as the USSR descended from failed social experiment to full on gangster-state kleptocracy. We see in this one to your right how Pootee murders or jails not only political opponents, but anyone foolish enough to own a successful business he wants to steal. Doesn’t the blood red go so dramatically against the gold? Russia's shaky economy, hampered by a reliance on oil and gas, helps explain the country's weakness, and "some of Russia's weakness explains why they attacked us in the way they did," Maddow argues. She says Vladimir Putin exploited Russia's lucrative oil industry to support his vision of making Russia a superpower again. "When you've got one resource that's pulling in such a big revenue stream, you tend to end up with very rich elites who will do anything to hold onto power who stopped doing the other things that governments should otherwise be doing to serve the needs of the people," she said in an interview with All Things Considered. - from NPR[image] Aubrey McClendon - image from Business Insider In the next room we have a few portraits of energy bigwigs, Aubrey McClendon, a genius at picking land to hold for resource development, promoter of shale and gas drilling in the USA and iconic Oklahoma City booster. Liked to use company money for his personal needs and had issues with price-fixing collusion. Got kicked out of his own company. Robert S. Kerr, founder of Kerr McGee, and a remarkably corrupt politician. Harold Hamm, a self-made billionaire who never saw an environmental regulation he did not hate, or a tax he was willing to accept. The big one at the end of the hall, the screaming T-Rex is, of course Rex Tillerson, still spreading carnage across the planet and not yet trapped in that tar-pit with the “DJT” inscription barely visible on it. As you can see in the painting, the artist was aware that T-Rex hunted in packs. No one is safe when these toothy critters were looking for a meal. The bones you see in the background are the remains of scientists who dared to describe the impact carbon-based energy usage has had on the planet, and residents who opposed the local leader siphoning off all the oil royalties for themselves. [image] Harold Hamm - image from AP via Politico Up ahead the mural you see may remind you of Picasso’s Guernica, but this one is called The Resource Curse. It shows how a poor country discovers oil, the pastoral fields being flooded with black, the local leader growing at one end of the mural from a small bully to an inflated grotesque crushing his people alongside an even larger T-rex, the people fleeing and screaming in despair. [image] Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the Equatorial Guinea president, living large on the oil revenues siphoned from the country – image, one of many showing his impressive array of insanely expensive vehicles, from Ghafla! Not all the reporting in the book is horrifying or depressing. Here is one that shows a ring of Russians holding hands, dressed like Americans, living in America. Russian spies, sent here to infiltrate the western enemy, sleeper cells, waiting for the day they would be summoned into action. It was the only part of the book that was laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll see why when you read it. [image] Ten members of the Russian spy program – the inspiration for the TV series The Americans - maybe you recognize a former neighbor here? – image from ABC.Net.AU The next room is kept nicely refrigerated. The ice sculpture in the middle of the room shows an oceanic drilling rig, with dark lines standing in for the inability of the rigs to keep from leaking, and the parts scattered on the icy ocean surface standing in for the advanced safety rig elements that were not used in these early drilling attempts. [image] The Discoverer - grounded in Unalaska, AK, unable to handle Arctic winds – not reassuring – image from Pew Trust As our tour comes to an end, you can leave those parkas in the bin by the door, and be sure to load up with paper towels from the table ahead. It would appear that the billions invested by the energy business in advancing the technology of extraction has in no way been matched by investment in researching clean-up tech. You hold in your hands the state of the art in oil spill clean-up. Pause briefly to smile. Before you read Blowout, you should stock up on your blood pressure medication, maybe schedule some extra time for mindfulness, meditation, or whatever works to keep you from completely losing your mind to absolute rage. Recently a religious friend wondered whether the current president might be the anti-Christ promised in the epistles of John, (and in Islamic lore as well). I suppose Trump would serve as well as any, but on further thought, it seemed to me that, as Trump was very much a puppet of Putin, and thus deserved a demotion, and as Putin was not only running Trump, but has his tentacles around many political and non-political people of importance around the planet, it was Pootee who deserved the title more. On reading Maddow’s book, I am having third thoughts. If Putin is the source of most of the evil in the world (well, certainly a lot of it, anyway) who or what is it that is moving Putin? As you will see in Blowout, much of the mischief Putin has engaged in regarding the USA elections stems from a desire to remove the sanctions imposed after Pootee hacked off the Crimean piece of Ukraine to be absorbed into the Russian Borg. Limitations on the fluidity of the oligarch funds in the West were problematic, particularly as Pootee was the biggest oligarch of them all. But even worse was the limitation placed on western investment in Russia. On its own, and despite its spectacular glut of natural petro/gas resources, Russia is just this side of a failed state, unable to keep up with advances in technology that are now widespread in the West. Russia NEEEEDS the western investment of contemporary extraction technology to retrieve the resources with which it has been blessed, having placed all his national development chips on oil and gas. It is only the nerve of western leaders like Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Joe Biden, with the bi-partisan support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other western nations, that saw to it that sanctions were imposed. This kept Pootee from being able to fully exploit Russia’s carbon-based fuel supplies. Not that he or his minions are gonna starve any time soon, but they cannot come close to realizing their ultimate avaricious or nationalistic fantasies without modern means of sucking every last drop out of the ground. And as energy resources have become a primary usable weapon (really, if he let loose the nukes, Russia, and much of the world, would be in cinders in an hour, so not really a practical weapon for immediate needs) in Russian geopolitics, (along with cyber-crime of diverse sorts) he would like to be as well-armed as possible. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that, I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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| Oct 08, 2019
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it was amazing
| Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cur Yes, the universe wants to kill us. But on the other hand, we all want to live. So let’s find a way together to deflect the asteroids, find the cure to the next lethal virus, mitigate hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. This can only be enabled by the efforts of a scientifically and technologically literate public. Therein lies a hope on Earth far greater than ever promised by the act of prayer or introspection.It can be a bit of a challenge when talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson, deciding just where to start. Overall, one would have to say that He is the public face of space, this side of fiction, anyway. And speaking of fiction, he was cast in a recent Neal Stephenson novel, SevenEves, albeit with a nom du plume. He has published 14 books, hosted several science-focused TV series, including Cosmos, Star Talk, Origins, the Pluto Files and more. He is only the fifth ever head of the New York Planetarium, served on presidential science advisory councils, has been awarded NASA’s highest non-government-employee award. He is the teacher you wished you had for science, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and encouraging, and with a wonderful sense of humor. [image] Neil deGrasse Tyson - image from his site And if that is not enough, he is a remarkably charming guy, and a wonderful writer. In a recent Late Show interview with Whoopi Goldberg (at 7:21 of the clip), when Stephen Colbert asked her who her favorite ever guest was, she said Tyson, because he could talk for three hours straight, and they would all be wonderful, informative hours. And if Whoopi loves spending time with the guy, really, who are we to argue? How do you defend yourself when you have received a letter that proclaims you a “pooh-pooh head” for your role in downgrading Pluto to dwarf-planet status? What can you say to people who challenge you on religion, God, philosophy, who see responsibility for the 9/11 assaults in celestial alignments? This book consists of NDT’s responses to about 75 letters he’s received over the years, on a wide range of subjects. He also writes about some personal feelings and events, like his relationship with his father, or more ethereal considerations of nature. And some are just for fun, like his selection of the most scientifically BS movies of all time, or a museum visitor picking up a display information error that had been there for a very long time, and which NDT had had a hand in approving. Oopsy. There are some very heart-warming passages in which he encourages young learners. He opens with a look at his early exposure to NASA, not as the inspiration it was for so many, but as consistent excluder of people like him. He writes a birthday note to NASA, which was born the same month as he was. …you should know that among my colleagues, I am the rare few in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope and the Hayden Planetarium.NASA moved forward in its employee selection with time, and Tyson would serve as an advisor to America’s space agency. He looks at extraordinary claims, the Cosmos, science denial, philosophy, matters of life and death, his experience with 9/11, religious faith, school issues, and parenting. A chapter titled “Rebuttals” is reserved for special smackdowns. Some chapters are more potpourri than focused. There is a fair bit of overlap among the chapters in subject material, but not enough to negate the structure of the book. Some notions are repeated maybe a time or two too often, but that is a small blemish. Tyson, above all, defends science as the way to understand the workings of the world and the universe. And castigates those who would substitute scriptural revealed truths for the objective, testable approach science offers. His correspondents include men, women, children, prisoners, celebrities, folks of diverse political stripes and religious persuasions. He responds to scientists, teachers, athletes, and morons. All with charm, knowledge, and wisdom. The incoming letters are querulous, admiring, and sometimes hate-filled. Tyson offers some surprising observations on things like the value of IQ, the best books to read, and an actual diamond in the sky. He remembers some people he admires. There is occasional snark in his replies, but, IMHO, not nearly enough. He offers a moving message to a fan who is about to lose a dying mother, and tells how Richard Holbrooke’s interest in science informed his diplomatic work. Like Whoopi says, listening to Neil for three hours is perfectly fine, and I expect you will find the time you spend with him in the pages of this book to be just as rewarding. Not only is NDT great at what he does, which is working to educate Americans about science, he is very warm, human company, who is blessed with a gift for explaining science, and an ability to write that smooths that educational element even more. In that interview Stephen Colbert did with Whoopi, she notes that after spending time with Tyson, she remembered more, of the science things he had been talking about, than she’d expected. Maybe you will too. It most certainly won’t hurt to try. And you have any questions, you could always just send the guy a letter. Review first posted – October 4, 2019 Publication date – October 8, 2019 I received an ARC of this book from Norton in return for a review that would stand up to scientific scrutiny. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages It would be redundant to add here the vast number of links one could use to connect with Tyson’s various activities. His primary site, at the Planetarium, offers those in abundance. But here's one anyway -----NY Times - April 17, 2021 - Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks Science Can Reign Supreme Again by David Marchese ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 13, 2019
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Aug 18, 2019
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Hardcover
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0062880322
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really liked it
| ...the sensors jammed into a mako’s head resemble the cockpit of an F-35 fighter jet. [presumably without the design flaws and cost overruns] The mako ...the sensors jammed into a mako’s head resemble the cockpit of an F-35 fighter jet. [presumably without the design flaws and cost overruns] The mako’s sensors are equal in sophistication to the fighter jet’s advanced systems except they are bundled in nerves, flesh, and blood.Not comforting. It was the shark tournament that spurred him to action. William McKeever has had a lifelong interest in sharks, ever since his father took him fishing in Nantucket Sound as a kid. An encounter with a caught (and released) dogfish led to long curiosity-driven hours at the library, hunting down, then devouring all he could find on sharks. A few years ago, a lifetime later, on a weekend in Montauk, he got to see appalling scene after appalling scene, large numbers of sharks on display, most thrown away post photo, a Breughelesque scene of mindless genocidal mayhem, otherwise known as the Montauk Shark Tournament. A bit more research revealed that, despite the bad rap sharks have gotten from our popular media, (I mean you, Spielberg) most shark “attacks” are the equivalent of a dog bite. It really is the sharks who are probably wondering if it’s safe to go back into the water. While sharks kill an average of four humans a year, humans kill 100 million sharks each year. That is not a typo. Humans kill 100 million sharks each year. [image] William McKeever - image from McKeever’s site Many of us engage in small ways to try to help when we see outrages in the world. Whether that means trying to help elect public officials who share our concerns, contributing to non-profits engaged in doing battle in our particular areas of interest, maybe volunteering to help out in some way. McKeever was a Wall-Street managing director at Paine Webber, UBS, and Merrill Lynch, and an analyst for Institutional Investor magazine, sharing his expertise on NBC, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal. But it turned out he had bigger fish to fry, and his financial success on Wall Street allowed him the means to pursue his passion. Bringing to light the damage that recreational fishing, particularly scenes of carnage like the one he had seen at Montauk, and the even greater mass annihilation of the world’s shark population by commercial fishing, became his mission. In 2018, he founded a conservancy tasked with helping protect sharks and other fish that man is wiping out, by showing sharks in a new light, as the magnificent creatures they are, survivors extraordinaire, who were here before the dinosaurs, and will probably still be here after people are gone, if we don’t wipe them out first. [image] Hammerhead Shark - image from McKeever’s site In order to put together educational materials. You need to learn what there is to learn. Although McKeever’s interest had been of long-standing, and although he knew a hell of a lot, having produced two documentary films about sharks, McKeever visited major oceanographic facilities across the planet, interviewed leading scientists and conservationists, and distilled what he learned down to a very readable and informative 295 pages. In addition to producing this book, he and his team are working on a documentary film. It was hoped that it would be available in 2020, but it does not appear it was ever completed. [image] Tiger Sharks - image from McKeever’s site His investigative sojourn took two years, and was truly global, from Montauk, and Cape Cod, to the Florida coast and Keys, the Dry Tortugas, and Hawaii. He traveled to Taiwan, Cambodia, Australia, South Africa and the Bahamas. And I am sure I missed a few. He also interviewed experts, without literally diving in, in many other locations. [image] The Dry Tortugas - Bush Key - from our vault While occasionally these field trips were duds, not sighting anything more than a descending dorsal fin in Shark Alley, SHARK bloody ALLEY in South Africa, (although to be fair, not seeing sharks in Shark Alley does speak to the impact humans have had on shark population, so maybe not a dud after all), or noting his arrival in a place just to tick the box and then off to some other place. But mostly the first-person accounts of his meetings with a diverse set of experts, and his observations, both land-based and in the water, are illuminating, sometimes very surprising, and sometimes somewhat grim. [image] Shark Alley in rush hour - image from National Geographic McKeever concentrates on four sharks in particular, the Mako, Tiger, Hammerhead and Great White, offering fascinating information about each. Numerous popular articles have described the brain of a white shark as being the size of a walnut, a misleading and inaccurate comparison. The brain of an adult white shark is shaped like a “Y,” and from the scent-detecting bulbs to the brain stem, a shark’s brain can measure up to approximately 2 feet in length…relative to the body weight of birds and marsupials…the great white’s brain is massive.Makos and Great Whites hunt using their blazing speed, then close the deal with insanely powerful jaws, nicely lined with many large, very sharp teeth; Tiger sharks are also deadly fast, but they prefer to swim slowly and ambush prey with a sudden burst of speed. Tiger sharks like to sneak up on divers, disappearing and reappearing like a magician’s trick, which unnerves many. Can’t imagine why. [image] Mary Lee - a great white with over 75,000 FB followers- image from her site Sharks serve a very useful function in marine ecology. An impressive list of items found in very omnivorous Tiger shark stomachs, boat cushions, tin cans, license plates, tires, the head of a crocodile, for example, reinforces the notion that the shark is a high-tech machine assigned the modest job of ocean cleanup. When tigers remove garbage—weak and sick fish—they remove from the ocean bacteria and viruses that can harm reefs and seagrass. However, the tiger’s work extends beyond mere custodial work: as apex predators, tiger sharks play an important role in maintaining the balance of fish species across the ecosystem. Moreover, the research shows that areas with more apex predators have greater biodiversity and higher densities of individuals than do areas with fewer apex predators.Sorry, no Land Sharks. [image] Land shark - image from from SNL Fandom Sharks face considerable dangers beyond the risk of chowing down on diverse awful flavors of tire and tags that are not to their liking. You will share McKeever’s outrage when you read his description of the Montauk Tournament. There are gruesome descriptions of the vile, cruel behavior engaged in by people on commercial, and some sport fishing vessels. It makes one ashamed to be a human. You will shudder when you read of the practice of finning, done to satisfy the booming Asian demand for shark fin soup. Sharks face huge perils from sports fishermen, but the greatest danger is from long-lining. Ships drop fishing lines that are sometimes tens of miles long, with a baited hook every few feet. The catch is massive, but only part of what is caught is what the fishermen want. The rest, called bycatch, is thrown overboard, usually dead, sometimes not. It is the equivalent of clearcutting forests or mountaintop-removal mining. Kill them all and toss what you don’t want. Thus the stark disparity in shark-deaths-by-human versus human-deaths-by-shark. McKeever looks at what is likely the impact of climate change on some places where one might expect sharks in abundance but in which they have become scarce. [image] Denticles on a hammerhead – image from hammerheadsharks.weebly.com There are many details about sharks that may force the word “wow” or “cool” from your lips. Like denticles. Rub a shark’s skin (a small, friendly shark) one way, and it is smooth. Reverse direction and it will feel like sand paper, or worse. Millions of years ago, sharks traded scales in for dermal denticles. These are small scale-like growths that function both as a sort of chain-mail protection and as an aid to swimming speed, as they reduce friction. Ok, you may have known about those, but what about a cephalofoil? Yeah, go ahead, look it up. [image] The Rainbow Warrior - image from Greenpeace McKeever spends some time on The Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s well-known vessel, learning a great deal about the challenges marine creatures face from unregulated international fishing. The chapter on human trafficking in the fishing industry is must-read material. You will be shocked at what he learned. It is clear that owners of fishing vessels that use and mistreat slave labor have no more regard for human life than they do for the sharks they slaughter by the millions. It was news to me that many of these ships remain at sea for years at a time, offering not even the possibility of escape for desperate captives. I had no idea. While the book is not suffused with the stuff, McKeever shows a delightful sense of humor from time to time. This is most welcome in a tale that can be quite upsetting at times. His writing is clear, direct, and mostly free of poetic, rapturous description, which is just fine. He tells what he has learned and believes is important for us to know. His personal experiences with close encounters of the shark kind are engaging and relatable. [image] Shark brain -image from wikimedia You will learn a lot from Emperors of the Deep. Some information may be a bit familiar, but I found that there was a lot in here that was news. I expect most of us have some general knowledge of sharks, and the image in our heads is probably the one created by Steven Spielberg in 1975. One of the best things you will get from this book is at least some appreciation for the range of sharks that share our planet, and what differentiates them from each other, but much more importantly an appreciation for how critical they are to the ecosystem, how much of a threat to people they aren’t, and how quickly we are wiping them out. There is a shark that swim sideways. Whoda thunk? You will gain a new appreciation for the significance of sea grass as a key player in the sustenance of marine ecosystems. [image] Seagrass - image from Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Gripes – The book could really use an index. There is a center section with color photographs. These are fine. I would have preferred graphics, whether drawings or photos, that illustrated the notions he was describing, particularly as regards shark anatomy. There are times when the author seems to lose his focus. For instance, his visit to Brisbane and a bit of attempted kayaking in a rough sea may have been a fun memory for him, but had not much to do with the mission of the book, as he dashes off 340 miles to catch a ferry to the Coral Sea, where the subject at hand is re-engaged. Descriptions of a shark brain, or denticles, differences in the eyes of diverse species, and sundry more items would have been greatly enhanced by the presence of right-there images. More curiosity than a gripe, I wondered about what McKeever had been up to between the time he left Merrill Lynch and when took up conservation. Finally, the book could have used a list of organizations mentioned in the book, with contact information. [image] Lego Mako Shark - image from ideas.lego.com The shark week schedule for 2024 can be found on its Discovery Channel site, here ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] I have also (August, 2023) put the entire, unbroken-up review on my site, Coots Reviews. Come on in. The water's fine. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 30, 2019
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Jul 31, 2019
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Jun 30, 2019
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1948226197
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| 3.67
| 4,131
| May 07, 2019
| May 07, 2019
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really liked it
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[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than a[image] Image from The Adventurists Many of the people I’ll meet on the steppe hold horses as sacred. There are more love songs about horses than about women in Mongolia—for example, ponies come last in races are sung commiseration songs because no one wants them to feel bad. Your horse is an extension of you. A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings—goes the proverb. Even horses’ skulls are sacred. They’re made into musical instruments, whose sounds comfort mourning souls.What has 25 legs and covers 1,000 kilometers? Why, the Mongol Derby, of course. Ring any bells? Ummm, me neither. Unless one is particularly attuned to the worlds of equestrian sports or extreme competitions we would be unlikely to have heard of it. Lara Prior-Palmer had heard of it, but had not paid much attention. The entry fee was exorbitant (about $13K US), which led her to expect that she would not be able to even think of attempting it until she was in her thirties, if then. A bored teen, a year out of high school, recently sacked from her au pair gig in Austria, her applications for other adventures producing a resounding silence, she was trolling about for her next thing, whatever might quell the inner buzz that grows louder and louder until it drowns out everything but a way forward, any way forward. She was looking on-line for something to quiet the din, when it reappeared. The passing London underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph—long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free—in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom of the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map.She read on, learning that thirty riders had already signed up, that riders switch ponies every 40 Km, that the race was held in a Pony Express style that recalled Chingiss Khan’s postal system, and that it was deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.” She clicked the box. [image] Lara Prior-Palmer - image from her Amazon page What are the things we might look for in a memoir of this sort? One would hope for a look at an exotic place from a perspective familiar to readers, presuming most readers to be Westerners. Given that it is a sports competition, we would hope for a look at the particulars of this race, what, if anything, sets it apart from other competitions? You’ve gotta figure that a 1,000 kilometer horse race would have to also be a journey of self-discovery, and there is at least some of that in here. Not to say that it was intended. The writing of this book began on the plane ride home to England from Ulaanbaatar, and was intended mostly as a large note-taking effort to better allow Lara to recall the event. Encouraged to expand her 25,000 words to book length by folks to whom she showed her writing, Prior-Palmer did just that, working on the manuscript, off and on, for about five years. It helps if the author can bring some talent, maybe an appreciation of beauty in her writing. [image] A Mongolian ger (yurt) - image from Phys.org Tough to get more exotic than Mongolia for most of us. And while you may be familiar with some of the weather the riders encounter, hot, cold, wind, hail, rain, you have probably not done so while engaged in a grueling horse race. Prior-Palmer fills us in on a host of local details. You will learn of the proper seating arrangements in a Mongolian ger (pronounced ‘gaire’), get a heads up on the proper behavior when encountering an ovoo, (a local shrine consisting of accumulated placed stones, and offerings), and marvel at car parts placed in trees to help gain the assistance of local deities in assuring that the subject vehicle remains in good working order. There are observations on Mongolian history and lore. One local historical figure was Molon Bagsh, an itinerant philosopher who supposedly predicted many of the wonders of the modern age from his perspective in the early 1900s. She offers a bit on the deep respect Mongolians have for their equine partners. One strand of Mongolian philosophy has it that my chest, not my brain, is the seat of my consciousness. It contains my heimori (wind-horse)—an inner creature whose power needs maintaining. When you rub a racehorse’s sweat into your forehead or ride a great, quick pony, you strengthen your heimori and improve your destiny.(You might want to towel off after that.) There are plenty more such, and they are delightful. The race itself occupies most of her consciousness. There is plenty of detail on how it is run, the accommodations, the horses, referred to here almost primarily as ponies. (BTW, to be a horse there is a height bar, 14.2 hands, or about four feet ten inches. Shorter than that, you are a pony. Mongolian equines tend to the shorter end of the bell curve.) The selection process. Which pony to choose? Based on what? Loving the ponies who were eager to fly, but having to cope with some which were far from enthusiastic. The relationships among the riders is pretty significant, particularly Lara’s relationship with an American rider, one Devan Horn, portrayed as a braggadocious Texan, certain that she will prevail. What begins as a bit of competitiveness becomes an all-consuming quest to see to it that this person is denied that victory. Her bonding, or not, with other riders, and non-riders (newspeople, veterinarians, race managers) is an ongoing subject. There are connections made or almost made during the race that highlight interpersonal challenges Lara must resolve, at least temporarily. It is difficult, and not at all necessary, to separate her coping with the race from her dealings with the locals. Riders often stay in the homes of residents, and Lara recalls some charming, as well as clueless interactions. [image] Ponies in waiting - image from The Adventurists Bear in mind that Lara was barely 19 years old when she undertook this adventure. Her age is certainly a factor in her degree of unpreparedness. While a good chunk of who we all are is well set by such an age, it takes plenty more years for the rest of the permanent us to form. What we see here is Lara as a work-in-progress. One element that manifests stronglyis the sort of stiff-upper-lip found in explorers and adventurers. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.She is also someone uncomfortable around public feelings. I shiver a little, relieved to be away from Clare. [a rider with whom Lara had spent some time during the competition] I find emotions contagious, swear I can catch them like flu. I’ve always been wary of upset and sickness. Aged seven, I dubbed people crybabies as though it were a life sentence and I winced in repulsion if someone missed school for sickness. I refused to let such a thing happen to me. Although later on I used sickness to save me from school, I still had no empathy for the unwell and the upset. Why would I try to imagine how Clare feels when I’m appalled she’s displayed the emotional hold the Derby has on her. Such is the strangeness of my selfishness.We get some background on family influences that fed her drive. Her Aunt Lucinda was an Olympian, having competed in equestrian events. Her favorite, no nonsense, phrase for just get on with it being “Crack On!” Her grandfather, a military general, was fond of “Just do it.” Firmed up for competition and adventure by such, she was much less able to cope with more emotional challenges. …my real fears aren’t the broken bones or the missing ponies. My real fears are long-term affairs like school, marriage, and jobs. Anything requiring a commitment longer than a ten-day race. Maybe because millions of people manage these commitments, they go unnoticed. Ordinary jobs and relationships—spread over humdrum time—are rarely thought of as brave or strong.And therein, among other such contemplations, is where we find some of the distance that Lara travels personally. Over the course of the book we see some development that maybe Lara herself does not quite perceive. Learning to see things from someone else’s perspective, learning to consider other ways to value things and actions. Her sense of not quite knowing who she is persists. It’s just I haven’t decided if I’m woodland-wild or fireside-tame, and probably never will. But she has certainly gained in building on the self-reflective muscle she finds inside. [image] Lara accepting a congratulatory call after her victory – Devan Horn in the background will have to wait for another chance-image from CNN A pointed element of self-realization is her change from seeing the race as an adventure, hoping mostly just to finish, to feeling the fire of competitiveness that was there all along, and not just to be able to stick it to Devan. There certainly must have been some part of Lara that chose a competitive adventure over the many others that the world offers. And she becomes more aware of that part of herself. She grew up in a culture that scorns overt ambition, and public presentations of self-confidence, so there was plenty of reason for her to suppress or hide her very real competitiveness. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.In addition to coping with some inner parts of herself undergoing a bit of examination, Prior-Palmer suffered some of the misfortunes that were visited on other contestants: bruises, dehydration, being tossed from her mount, having to get help retrieving it, becoming ill on the (for her) six-day race. And then there were self-imposed problems, being unprepared in sundry ways, like not bringing a map, not getting the recommended vaccinations, never having ridden even a one-day race, let alone one that could last ten days, or not providing for some sanitary needs. There is some contemplative poetic writing in Prior-Palmer’s memoir. Particularly when she writes of her feeling of oneness with her ponies. For two and a half hours my focus is whole. He moves fluently, and I note the quiet warmth of his company. You make no eye contact when riding, but we’re in communication, working a shared form, like shoaling fish. Horses have always been siblings to me, pressing their noses against my back and breathing out winter breath, slowly trusting. From his silence and the morning I draw something, something like strength…Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Everything in the hour is familiar. The pony hurries on beneath me, persuading his way into my heart. [image] Image from CNN A thread in the book consists of passages from The Tempest, one of the reading materials she brought with her, to illustrate this or that. The arrival of the storm-driven characters in Shakespeare’s final play, washed clean in a way, pops to mind as she is caught in downpour on the steppe. A passage in which Ariel sings about a sea change in the play connects with Lara feeling transformed while riding a pony she names The Lion. It is a lovely element, but still felt a bit forced. There was plenty going on without it. The book’s title is drawn from The Tempest as well, which seemed workshop-y and less than organic, at first, given that the “rough magic” referred to in the play has to do with the bard’s ability to present fiction as reality. But on further consideration, if we forget the Shakespearean bit for a moment, “Rough” certainly works as a description of the event, and “Magic” is certainly appropriate or the magical ending of the competition, and some of Lara’s perceptions. So, never mind. Since the race, Prior-Palmer, now 24, has been to University and worked on this book in fits and starts. She feels her experience gave her a better ability to consider alternate viewpoints. But she did not feel particularly changed by the race itself at the time. She remained very much who she was, an adventure-seeking, athletic, bright, articulate young woman with a world of possibilities ahead of her and a world-class achievement already in the bag. Review posted – May 31, 2019 Publication date -----May 7, 2019 - hardcover -----April 28, 2020 - Trade paperback ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 07, 2019
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May 14, 2019
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May 21, 2019
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Hardcover
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1643130226
| 9781643130224
| 1643130226
| 3.41
| 169
| Apr 2019
| Apr 02, 2019
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really liked it
| People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of societal scale, starting with an impaired individual manipulating psychological weaknesses in the population to achieve power, and then multiplying the disorder by duplicating it in the general culture.Tyrannical Minds offers a look at a collection of the worst of the worst in despotic leaders, over the last century or so, (sorry Genghis) by peering through a psychological lens at common characteristics. It looks at what may have made these guys the way they were, the traits they manifested, and how we might apply the patterns presented here to contemporary leaders. It is important not only in offering insight into how to deal with foreign despots, but to recognize the patterns in our own people and to try to keep that particular brand of misery from recurring. When Haycock first proposed the book, he was not planning on looking at any US presidents, but wound up having a substantial portion of the work focused on a certain morality-challenged president. [image] Dean A. Haycock - image from his Twitter pages There are plenty of folks today in positions of national leadership for whom the word Tyrant could apply. Madeleine Albright put together an impressive basket of such deplorables in her 2018 book, Fascism, but that used a different scope, offering a pretty narrow definition of fascism and looking to see who, among the considered leaders, might fit. Dean Haycock looks at a range of mostly dead leaders from a psychological perspective. The usual suspects pop up. Little moustache man, Uncle Joe, Chairman you-know-who, Dear Leader, Saddam, and others. What unites these folks? If we can come up with a unifying personality profile, how does DJT’s dainty foot fit into that glass jackboot? Can a psychological analysis of a person predict that person’s behavior under a range of circumstances? Maybe, maybe not. But what if the people doing the analyzing never get to meet their subjects in person? What if they have to rely on records of what the person has said and done? What if the best personal sources for information on the person under consideration have biases of their own that might taint their views? Haycock gives us some background on the psychological profiling of world leaders, including a nifty look at what our intel services cooked up on Adolph way back when. It’s pretty impressive. He looks at the controversies surrounding psychological analysis from a distance, and the role of the American Psychiatric Association in telling its members that it is unethical to offer a “diagnosis” without having conducted a personal examination of the subject. He brings in analysis from a range of professional psychologists and psychiatrists. Haycock points to a condition that is not in the official catalog of defined diagnoses, (the DSM-5, or Diagnostic and Statistical annual of Mental Disorders) Malignant Narcissism, and a broader characterization called the Dark Factor of Personality, or D-Factor. Much of the book is spent checking out the sundry tyrants to see how they measure up in the “D” scale. This includes appealing traits like Machiavellianism, feeling that rules do not apply to them, sadism, belief that they deserve more than anyone else, that they are better than everyone else, callousness, craving admiration and praise, engaging in vendettas against critics…it goes on. Is this ringing any bells? I think we’re gonna need a bigger scale. [image] Young Adolph with Daddy Dearest - image from Warthunder.com Haycock makes a point that plenty of people are narcissistic. It takes a special level of self-involvement to raise that to a diagnosable Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD. And therein lies a significant challenge if one is looking to the narrow point of whether DJT can be diagnosed with a serious mental illness. A counter argument is made that diagnosis is less important than the potential for harm. And mental health pros are duty bound to issue warnings to those who might be affected by the behavior of such subjects. It is clear that there are several factors that must dovetail to generate a top-flight tyrant. First, of course, is DNA. The little SOB needs to have an inherent predilection. But that is far from enough. It helps if the predilection is nurtured by, say, an abusive parent or caregiver. It’s not required, mind you. Mao, for example, was spoiled rotten as a kid. But it definitely helps. You might think of the layout as means (DNA), motive (being pissed off at the world), and last, but not least, opportunity. In this case that means a period of political instability. While it is pretty easy to see that in the case of Hitler’s Germany, suffering from the penalties of losing World War I, and Russia suffering under the Czars and war with Germany. It is less obvious to see a comparable level of societal distress in the USA. Some level, for sure, as wages have stagnated and the economic gains of the last several decades have gone mostly to the already well-to-do. But, while it may be angst and/or rage-inducing, it is not entirely clear that this bit would pass muster in establishing the requisite baseline. There is certainly grounds for concern as more and more jobs are automated or off-shored, and everyone has to worry about whether they will be laid off. And I suppose the increasing ethnic/religious hostility generated by some media sources and happily employed by feckless politicians has been contributing to a growing sense of internal national conflict. Add to the mix that we have some outsiders doing their best to fan the flames of hatred. So, while it may not be a period of turmoil comparable to that experienced by many other nations, or by the USA in other times, there might be enough to push it over the line. In making a point that nurture alone is not sufficient, Haycock offers a comparison of two unnamed boys. Both suffer very similar, miserable upbringings. One becomes a productive member of society, a recording artist. The other becomes Stalin. It is not at all obvious in reading the two stories which was which. A good warning not to jump to conclusions. There is particularly fascinating look at how paranoia serves to keep tyrants in power, while generating a feedback loop that generates more and more paranoia. This includes an insightful look at why it is that working for such people presents an existential threat. [image] Chairman Mao and Stalin (2 photos were merged) – image from BBC Managerial competence allows some despots to thrive (Stalin), while incompetence leads to their demise (Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein) Of course, one might also contend that it was less that they were incompetent than that they made mistakes, which even competent leaders can do. Haycock sees Trump as more like Amin than Stalin. His incompetence emanates, at least, from his bigotry, and manifests in a blatantly racist handling of national immigration policy. The long-term impact of his whites-only immigration preference remains to be seen, but it seems likely that creative intellectual and entrepreneurial migrants will be considering options other than the USA in which to practice their trade, develop new technologies, and build new businesses. This will be a huge loss for the country. Idi Amin made a point of throwing out of Uganda the Asian population that was responsible for a considerable percentage of the national economy. It did not work out well for Amin or Uganda. It seems to me that Trump is less a despot than a wannabe despot. Even when he was merely a candidate, Trump did not really expect to win. He was running as a large-scale business promotion. That is one reason why there was no compunction about pursuing a deal for Trump Tower Moscow during (and certainly after) the campaign. The expectation was that if he lost, no one would care. (The Producers model of politico-econo flim flam) Thus, he did not approach running for president as a quest for power in the same way that other mononymous despots had. Some of them had a form of Messiah Complex, with an associated vision of how things should be remade in their countries. Hitler imagined a Third Reich. Mao wanted to bring medieval China into the modern age. Trump’s primary interest is in stuffing his pockets. He is so extremely narcissistic that he does not care about the country, and would sell (already has sold) it out to feather his own nest. No grand visions here, just avarice. Most of the public policies he pursues are all tactical. He does what he can to keep his base riled and his donors content, and if he can spice that up with a bit of abuse and sadism, well that makes him feel pretty good too. That said, he does manifest some of the behavior that people with a Messiah Complex might, proclaiming that only he can fix things, for instance. But is he the dire, murderous threat that these others clearly were? [image] Saddam Hussein - image from Der Spiegel As a candidate, definitely not. Not much was at stake, really. But as a president, the terms have changed. He has been the subject of many investigations, with many more to come. The only reason he has not already been indicted is that he occupies the highest office in the land. But once he is threatened with ouster, whether by voters or legal proceedings, predicting the future becomes quite a dicey matter. Given his gargantuan narcissism, he cannot tolerate the possibility of rejection (thus the BS about three million mystery voters for Hillary in 2016), and can certainly not tolerate the humiliation of possible arrest, which he would almost certainly face, whether from federal charges possibly recommended by Robert Mueller in the federal realm, or by diverse state authorities. Faced with this, and in the absence of some sort of face-saving exit strategy (leaving office due to ill-health?) there is a very real possibility that he would resort to bloody means to keep himself in office. At that point he might call in someone like Erik Prince to organize whatever private military measures might be necessary to prevent his removal. Sinclair and Fox would be more than happy to go along. And his more cultish followers would insist that he was somehow defending the nation, and not just keeping his corrupt ass out of jail. Hopefully it will not come to that. (This review was first posted in May 2019. The events of January 6, 2020, Desecration Day, provide plenty of evidence that DJT was indeed all in for violence as a way to retain power. It remaims to be seen whether Erik Prince played any role in that.) You know how the Mueller report laid out so many of the awful things that Trump did, but weaseled on bringing actual charges against him? Well, for now. (DOJ guidelines on the prosecutability of the president are internal DOJ rules, not settled law) It’s a lot like that here. Haycock makes it clear that Trump is the poster child for malignant narcissism, with plenty of “D” to keep his tank overflowing, but will not commit to a yes or no on whether the man should be removed from office. It does seem clear, though, that he considers him a potential menace to us all. [image] Idi Amin - image from Face to Face Africa The book is definitely thought-provoking, adding some needed nuance to considerations of mental health in the highest office in the land, and contributes some new concepts to our store of things to be taken into account in looking ahead. I particularly enjoyed the historical elements and appreciated the which-one-will-become-the-tyrant piece. I had some difficulty with what seemed repetition and a bit of murkiness, as we moved from one set of dark traits to another. Had to metaphorically rub my head and concentrate, so is this trait necessary? How about this one? But what if he is missing this one? I understand that things psychological do not always lend themselves to mathematical models, but I can still wish for that, right? Bottom line is that even if the president is running naked in the Oval, hurling his feces all over the walls, thinks Pence is Lurch from the Addams Family, and screams incoherently at anyone who comes into his office, his cabinet and close advisors, and the Republican Party have shown no inclination to do anything about it anyway. Thus, the benefit of this book is less about how we might fix a mental health problem in the Presidency than an offering of grave concern about what a fear-ravaged, and/or barking president might mean for us all. As the institutions of our republic continue to face daily assault by this White House, it is worthwhile to have a sense of just how frightened we ought to be. Review posted – May 10, 2019 Publication dates ----------April 3, 2019 - hardcover ----------April 6, 2021 - trade paperback I received an ARE of Tyrannical Minds from Norton in return for my unquestioning allegiance, and support for their quest for world dominance. I promise I am not plotting anything against them. [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved the EXTRA STUFF segment of the review to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 26, 2019
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May 05, 2019
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May 04, 2019
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Hardcover
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0393292800
| 9780393292800
| 0393292800
| 4.12
| 343
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| Apr 30, 2019
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really liked it
| From the outside, Shining Path could appear to be an invulnerable force. A War Machine, some called it. Lurgio and his fellow fighters had no such From the outside, Shining Path could appear to be an invulnerable force. A War Machine, some called it. Lurgio and his fellow fighters had no such illusions in their stone shelters. They came mostly from peasant families, a ragged band of children and teens, who had just a few rifles and not many more bullets.The book opens with a prosecutor’s visit and search of a prison cell, the occupant, nearing eighty, one Abimael Guzman, jailed for over twenty years, and destined to remain so for the rest of his dwindling days. It is a punishment deemed far too lenient by many. Guzman had led the Peruvian insurgency known as The Shining Path, (Sendero Luminoso) causing the deaths of thousands of his countrymen. All in a good cause, he still thinks. And he still dreams. But the reality is that his dream is done. [image] Co-authors Miguel La Serna and Orin Starn in Peru researching the Shining Path - image from Duke Today The Shining Path may not ring many bells for you. It was a Peruvian insurgency founded by Guzman in 1970. By 1980 it was ready to fight in earnest. The bloodshed would continue until the late 1990s, when the insurgency was mostly defeated. It took its name from the maxim of the founder of Peru’s first communist party, José Carlos Mariátegui: “El Marxismo-Leninismo abrirá el sendero luminoso hacia la revolución” (“Marxism-Leninism will open the shining path to revolution”) - from BritannicaOrin Starn and Miguel La Serna have written a fascinating history of the movement. In addition to timelines and major events, they take a close look at the personalities involved and offer diverse perspectives. They look at origins of the movement and motivations of the people who participated in it. [image] Abimael Guzman Reynoso - image from Harvard Art Museums There is quite a cast of characters here. Guzman, of course, (aka Chairman Gonzalo) is front and center, moving from charismatic teacher to committed political force to murderous leader of a violent rebellion, to megalomaniacal control freak, to, ultimately, jail in 1992. The movement would continue for several years more after his capture but the loss of his leadership and that of other movement members seriously hampered the SP. Second in command was Augusta La Torre, (aka Comrade Norah) a dedicated revolutionary, who used her considerable people skills to recruit fighters and lead them to do unspeakable things. There is the world-renowned writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose public acclaim led him to try to mediate political disputes, and later run for president. Maria Elena Moyano was a black woman of great political skill, who stood against the Senderistas, and faced increasing danger as her notoriety and political power grow. A reporter, Gustavo Gorriti, latched onto the story of the Shining Path and stuck with it to the end. [image] Augusta LaTorre - image from vnd-peru.blogspot There are individuals, whose personal stories illuminate what the experience of life was like when you could as easily be murdered by the government forces as by those who opposed them. The police unit, The Ghostbusters, assigned to find the elusive SP leadership, comes in for a look as well. Their origin and approach are intriguing, as are the politics that allowed its creation, the personnel who made it work, and their methodologies. Guzman was a gifted teacher, and confirmed Communist, but not just any brand. The established Communist Party in Peru was very much of the Russian bent. Guzman was a follower of Mao. In fact, both he and Augusta spent time in China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, learning tactics and honing their political rigidity. That training led them to focus their organizational efforts, a la Mao, on rural peasants rather than in cities. It was accessible turf for people who were gifted at articulating what it was that was keeping everyone so poor. It helped that Peru had a long history of political corruption. It also helped the SP cause that enough of their leaders spoke Quechua, the native tongue of the mountain peasants. It made for a pretty concrete Us versus the Spanish-speaking, urban Them. [image] Mario Vargas Llosa - campaigning for president in 1990 - image from Excelsior The book shifts focus from this to that person, each section spending enough time with the focal character of the moment to give you a sense of what they were about, what motivated them, how they came to be where they were, and to be doing what they were doing during this period. “The material can be complicated, but we tried to craft it into a story that had characters the reader might care about,” Starn said. “It was a challenge to weave this plot together. It has a Greek tragic arc. High hopes for revolution. The blood of war and then destruction and loss, with nothing achieved at all.” - from the Duke Today articleI found that the looks at Guzman and Augusta did not satisfactorily explain how such middle class people could become so godawful bloodthirsty. Augusta came from a land-holding, educated family, with no indication of fanaticism in her upbringing. Guzman had a less charmed childhood, but it does not sound horrific. He, in particular, seems to go through a metamorphosis from political leader to nutcase. I heartily recommend for your consideration the book, Tyrannical Minds, for a look at some other leaders who have seriously gone off the rails. Like most would-be despots Guzman got off on elevating his image among his followers, portraying himself as a leader on par with Mao, Lenin and Marx. He also never met a rule he was not comfortable bending or breaking to suit his own purposes. Too much praise, and too much early success clearly went to his head. But what was it in his background that made him so susceptible to the attractions of megalomania? This is a history, not a psychoanalysis, so one can be forgiven for not offering a clinical diagnosis, but it would have been quite interesting to see where he fit on the tyrannical mind scale. By the end, Guzman seemed just this side of declaring the official language of Peru to be Swedish. [image] Gustavo Gorriti - image from BBC The book offers a look at the politics of Peru of the Shining Path era, and some of what was happening in the world. Eastern European communism was failing, with open rebellions in several countries, and the Berlin Wall being breached in 1989. Guzman saw this as a failure of Soviet Communism but not of the Maoist sort. He saw that post-Mao China also was moving toward a more capitalistic, if hardly free society. So the SP was an anachronism in its time, a 1940s Maoist peasant revolution in a world in which market economy philosophy was gaining power, and perestroika was taking hold. [image] A defiant Irena Iparraguirre stands in prison stripes facing reporters and military in 1992 - image from the Duke Today article There is some intrigue, beyond the purely political, in the suggestion that Guzman and his mistress, Irena Iparraguirre, did in Augusta, so that she could take Augusta’s place as second in charge and Guzman’s wife. Given the seriousness of the notion, there is very little in the book backing up the notion as anything more than fake news. She reportedly killed herself. Maybe she did, and maybe she didn’t. The depiction is certainly suggestive. But a better case should have been made, if the subject was to be raised. Some party leaders wondered about Augusta’s death, and, if she hung herself, exactly why. Elvia Zanabria, Comrade Juana, suggested a formal investigation for the party record….Abimael refused to authorize an inquiry, which prompted the disillusioned Oscar Ramirez to question the suicide story in his own mind. Had Augusta been sick, perhaps dying from a fast-spreading cancer. Could she have been killed in some dispute over ideology and the revolution? Or because Elena and Abimael wanted out of the way to proceed with a covert love affair? It was typically self-serving, Ramirez thought, that Abimael professed his commitment to transparency and clarity, and yet rejected any party investigation into Augusta’s death. “Whenever [party norms] did not serve his personal interests, he just ignored them or pushed them aside,” Ramirez said years later. [image] Maria Elena Moyano - a force for sanity during the Shining Path terror – image from Peru21 The path Mario Vargas Llosa follows is fascinating. We meet him as a fifteen-year-old cub reporter. Later, as a world-class talent returning from his life in Spain to get into the local political muck, and facing charges of being an outsider because of his years abroad. It is the close-in portraits that give this book it’s considerable weight. We get a close look at a young peasant involved in the movement, and also peasants who form militias to battle the guerillas. But the close-in looks represent a choice. One might argue that a portrait of the period, and even of the players, might have been more effective in providing the big picture by taking a step backward. Why, for example, was the SP able to succeed in creating a revolutionary movement that impacted the nation far beyond it’s actual size. What was it about Peru that led it through serial military coups over its history? We see how quickly the SP began killing people who could have been their allies, how fast they became less a revolutionary movement and more a terrorist one. One can understand some of their actions intellectually, but only with a childish mind. They could never possibly win so long as they made so many enemies of those who were potential allies. They went after unions, the mainstream legal left, political candidates, and non-profits. They wanted to destroy the democratic process itself. Many local militias sprung up to defend their communities from SP attacks. [image] Alberto Fujimori - prevailed over Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990 presidential There is plenty here on government abuses, black sites, wholescale murder and torture. And also on legitimate attempts by some administrations to address the inequities in Peru. What is the benefit to all this, in addition to filling in some gaps in our historical knowledge? One thing is that it points out the dangers of leaders losing contact with reality. I know it is something many of us think about every day. Another is to see how sane ideals become murderous demands. There are rebellions going on in the world that actually look to the Shining Path as source of inspiration. Understanding the SP allows us to better understand those who follow that road. Also, whether inspired by the SP or not, there are movements in the world that have much in common with it. See the article noted in EXTRA STUFF about the similarities of ISIS to the SP. It was the authors’ intent to provide a front to back history of the Shining Path that was accessible to a broad reading public. Most of what has been written to date about the movement has been of a more academic nature. One thing the authors point out is that The Shining Path was an equal-opportunity terrorist organization. While Guzman may have been the head, two women ran the show alongside him. Also, the body of the party, including operations personnel, was about half female as well. There was a reconciliation Commission established after the SP was taken down. Much information was gathered, but little justice was meted out to government killers. Many bodies of those killed or disappeared remain to be found. It can be a little tough following along, and keeping all the names straight. The index helps a lot. Making your own list of who’s who is an approach I recommend. [image] An unrepentant Abimael Guzman in 2018 - image from Americantv.com Bottom line is that The Shining Path offers an accessible, eye-opening report on a failed revolutionary movement that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, and made Peru a risky tourism destination for about twenty years. You will get to know the primary people involved, and see how the movement developed, changed, and ultimately, failed. You will not get a lot of analysis placing this in the context of today’s insurrectionist movements. But you will still learn a lot, which is always a beautiful thing. Both Lenin and Mao displayed a considerable willingness to compromise in order to achieve revolutionary victory. Despite his diatribes against concessions and the incorrect line, the Bolshevik leader accepted the German kaiser’s help against the tsar. Mao allied with Chiang Kai-chek’s Nationalists to fight the Japanese before seizing China for himself by driving them to Taiwan…By contrast, the senderistas maintained their absolute contempt for elections and any negotiations with the government. They never developed a strategy for dealing with disaffected villagers besides trying to bludgeon them into submission. That brutality was self-defeating,,, Review first posted – 8/30/19 Publication – 4/30/19 EXTRA STUFF is in Comment #1 below But because of changes to GR rules since this was posted, which make it a challenge to add external links to comments, requiring that all existing links be undone in order to make any edits, I have added this link here. AP - February 18, 2023 - From a secret safehouse, Peru’s Indigenous revolt advances by JOSHUA GOODMAN ...more |
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4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 06, 2020
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3.82
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it was amazing
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3.91
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it was amazing
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Sep 26, 2020
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3.88
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2020
not set
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Jul 29, 2020
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4.26
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it was amazing
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Jun 05, 2020
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3.50
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May 24, 2020
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4.27
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it was amazing
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May 23, 2020
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May 22, 2020
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4.15
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really liked it
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Apr 06, 2020
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Apr 06, 2020
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3.92
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it was amazing
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Mar 21, 2020
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Mar 25, 2020
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3.88
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really liked it
|
Mar 09, 2020
|
Mar 09, 2020
|
||||||
3.97
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 24, 2020
|
Feb 24, 2020
|
||||||
4.15
|
it was amazing
|
Feb 11, 2020
|
Feb 10, 2020
|
||||||
4.28
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 25, 2020
|
Feb 07, 2020
|
||||||
3.93
|
liked it
|
Dec 29, 2019
|
Dec 25, 2019
|
||||||
4.35
|
it was amazing
|
Dec 14, 2019
|
Nov 02, 2019
|
||||||
4.07
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 20, 2019
|
Aug 18, 2019
|
||||||
3.98
|
really liked it
|
Jul 31, 2019
|
Jun 30, 2019
|
||||||
3.67
|
really liked it
|
May 14, 2019
|
May 21, 2019
|
||||||
3.41
|
really liked it
|
May 05, 2019
|
May 04, 2019
|
||||||
4.12
|
really liked it
|
Jun 29, 2019
|
Apr 19, 2019
|